Pitch from zeros of bank-filtered signals

A new principle of pitch determination is presented. First, a speech signal is passed through a Gaussian bandpass filter-bank in order to obtain a set of bandlimited subsignals having greatly simplified signal structures while preserving the signal´s periodicity. Next, the zeros of each subsignal are extracted as significant temporal features for determining the periodicity and the period. This is performed by a newly derived dimensionless operator, which is selective only to abrupt phase transitions created by the zeros. Finally, a pitch period is determined based on an integration of the synchronized zeros over the all channels. Preliminary simulations with the speech signals in natural conditions showed that the event-based pitch determination algorithm worked well, even for male and female speech signals contaminated by considerable noise.<>