Vocal tract area based formant tracking using particle filter

This paper presents a novel method for estimating formant frequencies and bandwidths based on an underlying vocal tract model. A novel statistical model for vocal tract cross-sectional areas is developed which allows computation of full likelihood functions. Modifications to the basic particle filter algorithm have also been developed to help combat both diversity depletion and convergence problems. The performance of the method is evaluated against hand labeled formant database (L. Deng et al., 2003).