Pitch characteristics of bone conducted speech

This paper investigates the pitch characteristics of bone conducted speech. Pitch determination of speech signal can not attain the expected level of accuracy in adverse conditions. Bone conducted speech is robust to ambient noise and it has regular harmonic structure in the lower spectral region. These two properties make it very suitable for pitch tracking. Few works have been reported in the literature on bone conducted speech to facilitate detection and removal of unwanted signal from the simultaneously recorded air conducted speech. In this paper, we show that bone conducted speech can also be used for robust pitch determination even in highly noisy environment that can be very useful in many practical speech communication applications like speech enhancement, speech/speaker recognition, and so on.