Noise and reverberation effects on depression detection from speech

Speech-based depression detection has gained importance in recent years, but most research has used relatively quiet conditions or examined a single corpus per study. Little is thus known about the robustness of speech cues in the wild. This study compares the effect of noise and reverberation on depression prediction using 1 ) standard mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), and 2) features designed for noise robustness, damped oscillator cepstral coefficients (DOCCs). Data come from the 2014 Audio-Visual Emotion Recognition Challenge (AVEC). Results using additive noise and reverberation reveal a consistent pattern of findings for multiple evaluation metrics under both matched and mismatched conditions. First and most notably: standard MFCC features suffer dramatically under test/train mismatch for both noise and reverberation; DOCC features are far more robust. Second, including higher-order cepstral coefficients is generally beneficial. Third, artificial neural networks tend to outperform support vector regression. Fourth, spontaneous speech appears to offer better robustness than read speech. Finally, a cross-corpus (and cross-language) experiment reveals better noise and reverberation robustness for DOCCs than for MFCCs. Implications and future directions for real-world robust depression detection are discussed.