Fundamental Frequency Estimation by Combinations of Various Methods

Several pitch estimation algorithms have been proposed over the decades, but they have tended to become more and more complex and cumbersome, some of them requiring much more computational power than a real-time application can afford. Rather than have one sophisticated algorithm, here we propose to combine the output of several conventional and relatively simple algorithms by various dedicated combination schemes. These combination methods perform a kind of weighted majority voting that helps find the correct solution when just a few of the basic algorithms go wrong. For testing purposes we compare the performance of the methods on a pitch-annotated corpora. The results show that with the combination schemes the amount of errors can be reduced by about 20-35% relative to the error of the best individual estimator