Speech Breathing Estimation Using Deep Learning Methods

Breathing is the primary mechanism for maintaining the sub-glottal pressure for speech production. Speech can be seen as a systematic outflow of air during exhalation characterized by linguistic content and prosodic factors. Thus, sensing respiratory dynamics from the speech is plausible. In this paper, we explore techniques for sensing breathing from speech using deep learning architectures including multi-task learning approaches. Estimating the breathing pattern from the speech would give us information about the respiration rate, breathing capacity and thus enable us to understand the pathological condition of a person using one's speech. Training and evaluation of our model on our database of breathing signal and speech for 40 subjects yielded a sensitivity of 0.88 for breath event detection and 5.6% error for breathing rate estimation.