Event-Based Instantaneous Fundamental Frequency Estimation From Speech Signals

Exploiting the impulse-like nature of excitation in the sequence of glottal cycles, a method is proposed to derive the instantaneous fundamental frequency from speech signals. The method involves passing the speech signal through two ideal resonators located at zero frequency. A filtered signal is derived from the output of the resonators by subtracting the local mean computed over an interval corresponding to the average pitch period. The positive zero crossings in the filtered signal correspond to the locations of the strong impulses in each glottal cycle. Then the instantaneous fundamental frequency is obtained by taking the reciprocal of the interval between successive positive zero crossings. Due to filtering by zero-frequency resonator, the effects of noise and vocal-tract variations are practically eliminated. For the same reason, the method is also robust to degradation in speech due to additive noise. The accuracy of the fundamental frequency estimation by the proposed method is comparable or even better than many existing methods. Moreover, the proposed method is also robust against rapid variation of the pitch period or vocal-tract changes. The method works well even when the glottal cycles are not periodic or when the speech signals are not correlated in successive glottal cycles.