Pitch detection using the short-term phase spectrum

A new frequency domain method for determining the fundamental frequency of speech is presented in this paper. This method uses the information contained in the short-term phase spectral whereas the previous methods were limited to the amplitude spectrum. The short-term spectrum is computed by DFT and it is interpreted as the output of a bank of band-pass overlapping filters. Harmonic components are detected by searching for sets of three contiguous filters having the same instantaneous frequency. The frequency of a detected harmonic is given by the instantaneous frequency itself. A conventional harmonic numbering algorithm is used to convert the set of detected harmonics to a value of the fundamental frequency. Preliminary results show the validity of the method.