Robust Pitch Estimation At Very Low SNR Exploiting Time and Frequency Domain Cues
Celia Shahnaz, Wei‐Ping Zhu, M. Omair Ahmad · 2006
In this paper, we present a joint time/frequency domain approach for pitch estimation of speech at a very low SNR. The kernel of this approach lies in introducing a new function for detecting the time-domain cue by modifying the circular average magnitude difference function (CAMDF). By using the new function in conjunction with the half-wave rectified version of the autocorrelation function, the pitch-peak can be emphasized and the non-pitch peaks suppressed. To guarantee a robust pitch detection in noisy speech, a priori frequency-domain estimate of the dominant pitch-harmonic is extracted as an additional cue and is utilized to optimally match the pitch-peak in time-domain. The proposed approach is simulated using the Keele reference database. It is shown that the proposed method using joint time and frequency domain cues is able to give a superior accuracy relative to some of the existing methods even at a very low SNR of -10 dB.