  Automatic detection of voice pathology enables objective assessment and
earlier intervention for the diagnosis. This study provides a systematic
analysis of glottal source features and investigates their effectiveness in
voice pathology detection. Glottal source features are extracted using glottal
flows estimated with the quasi-closed phase (QCP) glottal inverse filtering
method, using approximate glottal source signals computed with the zero
frequency filtering (ZFF) method, and using acoustic voice signals directly. In
addition, we propose to derive mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) from
the glottal source waveforms computed by QCP and ZFF to effectively capture the
variations in glottal source spectra of pathological voice. Experiments were
carried out using two databases, the Hospital Universitario Principe de
Asturias (HUPA) database and the Saarbrucken Voice Disorders (SVD) database.
Analysis of features revealed that the glottal source contains information that
discriminates normal and pathological voice. Pathology detection experiments
were carried out using support vector machine (SVM). From the detection
experiments it was observed that the performance achieved with the studied
glottal source features is comparable or better than that of conventional MFCCs
and perceptual linear prediction (PLP) features. The best detection performance
was achieved when the glottal source features were combined with the
conventional MFCCs and PLP features, which indicates the complementary nature
of the features.
