The current outbreak of a coronavirus, has quickly escalated to become a serious global problem that has now been declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization. Infectious diseases know no borders, so when it comes to controlling outbreaks, timing is absolutely essential. It is so important to detect threats as early as possible, before they spread. After a first successful DiCOVA challenge, the organisers released second DiCOVA challenge with the aim of diagnosing COVID-19 through the use of breath, cough and speech audio samples. This work presents the details of the automatic system for COVID-19 detection using breath, cough and speech recordings. We developed different front-end auditory acoustic features along with a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (bi-LSTM) as classifier. The results are promising and have demonstrated the high complementary behaviour among the auditory acoustic features in the Breathing, Cough and Speech tracks giving an AUC of 86.60% on the test set.

International audience

International audience

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the saturation of public health services worldwide.In this scenario, the early diagnosis of SARS-Cov-2 infections can help to stop or slow the spread of the virus and to manage the demand upon health services.This is especially important when resources are also being stretched by heightened demand linked to other seasonal diseases, such as the flu.In this context, the organisers of the DiCOVA 2021 challenge have collected a database with the aim of diagnosing COVID-19 through the use of coughing audio samples.This work presents the details of the automatic system for COVID-19 detection from cough recordings presented by team PANACEA.This team consists of researchers from two European academic institutions and one company: EURECOM (France), University of Granada (Spain), and Biometric Vox S.L. (Spain).We developed several systems based on established signal processing and machine learning methods.Our best system employs a Teager energy operator cepstral coefficients (TECCs) based frontend and Light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM) backend.The AUC obtained by this system on the test set is 76.31% which corresponds to a 10% improvement over the official baseline.

The Automatic Speaker Verification (ASV) systems are vulnerable to spoofing attacks. Detecting replay attack is the challenging Spoof Speech Detection (SSD) task, as several factors are involved during replay mechanism. Hence, it is important to analyze these factors for effective SSD task. This paper introduces the analysis of the replay speech focusing only on the effect of reverberation on the replay speech. The reverberation introduces delay and change in amplitude producing close copies of natural signal that makes natural components inseparable from the replay components and hence, fails to classify the replay speech signal. To that effect, we propose use of Teager Energy Operator (TEO) to compute running estimate of subband energies for replay vs. natural signal. These subband energies are mapped to cepstraldomain to get proposed Teager Energy Cepstral Coefficients (TECC) for replay SSD task. With the TECC feature set, we analyzed the individual performance for all the Relay Configurations (RC) with Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) as classifier. The experimental results gave lower Equal Error Rate (EER) of 11.73 % with TECC features and further reduced to 10.30 % with score-level fusion of LFCC and TECC features on evaluation dataset of ASVspoof 2017 challenge version 2.0 database.