Glottal Gap tracking by a continuous background modeling using inpainting.

The visual examination of the vibration patterns of the vocal folds is an essential method to understand the phonation process and diagnose voice disorders. However, a detailed analysis of the phonation based on this technique requires a manual or a semi-automatic segmentation of the glottal area, which is difficult and time consuming. The present work presents a cuasi-automatic framework to accurately segment the glottal area introducing several techniques not explored before in the state of the art. The method takes advantage of the possibility of a minimal user intervention for those cases where the automatic computation fails. The presented method shows a reliable delimitation of the glottal gap, achieving an average improvement of 13 and 18% with respect to two other approaches found in the literature, while reducing the error of wrong detection of total closure instants. Additionally, the results suggest that the set of validation guidelines proposed can be used to standardize the criteria of accuracy and efficiency of the segmentation algorithms.