Real-time pitch detection with a digital signal processor
Michiharu Mito, Kiyoshi Takahasi, Syuji Kurokawa, Syogo Nakamura, Tadahiro Kubota · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1988
Pitch detection is an important and essential technique in speech analysis, synthesis, and so on. There are many methods to extract voice pitch, but it is difficult to perform pitch extraction in real time. This paper describes a simple real-time pitch detection algorithm which directly estimates the interval between peaks of the waveform. This algorithm consists of the following two parts: one is the peak emphasis of voiced signals and the other is the pitch detection. The peak emphasis is obtained by running a DFS (discrete Fourier series) and a window operation. It is important to determine the peaks for the pitch measurement because the pitch period is obtained by estimating the interval between successive peaks representing the pitch period of the voiced signal. The peaks related to pitch are determined using a few simple rules. Since the voiced signal waveform includes several extra complicated peaks, these rules are constructed taking into account the characteristics of the voiced signal. Other peaks, which do not correspond to the pitch period, are rejected by a simple logical judgment. A real-time pitch detection algorithm has been realized using a conventional DSP.