DP-based determination of F0 contours from speech signals

A new algorithm for the determination of fundamental frequency ( F₀) contours is presented. For each voiced frame appropriate divisors of the frequency with the maximum energy in the spectrum are taken as F₀ candidates. An F ₀ contour is computed using a dynamic programming (DP) method by minimizing a weighted sum of the difference between consecutive candidates and the distance of the candidates to a predetermined local target value. With this algorithm a coarse error rate of 0.6% on the frame level and of 6.4% on the sentence level is achieved on a German speech database. On the average the difference to the reference is 1.9 Hz. The algorithm outperforms two conventional algorithms tested on the same data