Speech and Vision Lab

A new method for robust estimation of fundamental frequency (F0) from speech signal is proposed in this paper. The method exploits the high SNR regions of speech in time and frequency domains in the outputs of single frequency filtering (SFF) of speech signal. The high resolution in the frequency domain brings out the harmonic characteristics of speech clearly. The harmonic spacing in the high SNR regions of spectrum determine the F0. The concept of root cepstrum is used to reduce the effects of vocal tract resonances in the F0 estimation. The proposed method is evaluated for clean speech and noisy speech simulated for 15 different degradations at different noise levels. Performance of the proposed method is compared with four other standard methods of F0 extraction. From the results it is evident that the proposed method is robust for most types of degradations.