HMM-Based Multipitch Tracking for Noisy and Reverberant Speech

Multipitch tracking in real environments is critical for speech signal processing. Determining pitch in reverberant and noisy speech is a particularly challenging task. In this paper, we propose a robust algorithm for multipitch tracking in the presence of both background noise and room reverberation. An auditory front-end and a new channel selection method are utilized to extract periodicity features. We derive pitch scores for each pitch state, which estimate the likelihoods of the observed periodicity features given pitch candidates. A hidden Markov model integrates these pitch scores and searches for the best pitch state sequence. Our algorithm can reliably detect single and double pitch contours in noisy and reverberant conditions. Quantitative evaluations show that our approach outperforms existing ones, particularly in reverberant conditions.