Objective evaluation of surgery for cleft palate based on detection of plosive consonants

By considering the weak form or disappearance of plosive consonants in cleft palate speech,an approach is proposed for automatic diagnosis about if a children's palate is right,or to evaluate if a cleft palate surgery is successful.An auditory filter-bank is used as front-end processor.Then,the energy variation during the release phase of stops within each sub-band is estimated.When the average energy variation within each subband from the cleft palate group and post-palatoplasty group is compared,characteristics of the cleft palate group are identified as decreased energy variation in high frequency bands(209.8 Hz to 8000 Hz).Logistic regression reveals a high consistence(88.9%for syllable/di/,90.27%for syllable/bu/) between the proposed method and subject evaluation.