A novel filtering based approach for epoch extraction

In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm which uses simple lowpass filtering as pre-processing for detection of epochs. Lowpass filtering with an appropriate cut-off frequency removes the effect of vocal tract characteristics as formants lie in relatively higher frequency regions. The method is evaluated on entire CMU-ARCTIC database consisting of the electroglottograph (EGG) signals. Noise robustness of the proposed algorithm is evaluated in the presence of additive white noise with various SNR levels. Experimental results show that lowpass filtering make the proposed algorithm noise robust. The method gives comparable or better results with the two state-of-the-art methods, viz., ZFR and SEDREAMS (which require apriori knowledge of the pitch period). In addition, the proposed method shows an improvement in identification accuracy.