Glottal Source Features for Automatic Speech-Based Depression Assessment

Depression is one of the most prominent mental disorders, with an increasing rate that makes it the fourth cause of disability worldwide. The field of automated depression assessment has emerged to aid clinicians in the form of a decision support system. Such a system could assist as a pre-screening tool, or even for monitoring high risk populations. Related work most commonly involves multimodal approaches, typically combining audio and visual signals to identify depression presence and/or severity. The current study explores categorical assessment of depression using audio features alone. Specifically, since depression-related vocal characteristics impact the glottal source signal, we exa…