A novel F0 estimator for pitch enhancement in cochlear implant
Haiyang Hu, Meng Yuan, Qinglin Meng, Haihong Feng · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2012
Current experimental Cochlear Implant (CI) sound processing strategies like F0mod [Laneau, et.al., 2006], which aim to improve the pitch perception of CI subjects, amplitude-modulate the envelope of each frequency channel by the fundamental frequency (F0) of the speech sound. Due to the hardware limitation of CI devices, typical F0 estimation algorithms are too complex to be implemented. Low-complexity and accurate F0 estimator will be necessary for such manipulation. This study uses the Summary Auto-Correlation Function (SACF) to extract F0. The new pitch estimator was simulated and compared with typical algorithms that estimate F0 before the sub-band filtering. By the use of SACF, the new estimator reduces the computation load significantly and preserves good F0 estimation performance. # This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (11104316), and Shanghai Natural Science Foundation (11ZR1446000).