On the Usefulness of the Speech Phase Spectrum for Pitch Extraction

Erfan Loweimi, Jon Barker and Thomas Hain

Abstract:

Most frequency domain techniques for pitch extraction such as cepstrum, harmonic product spectrum (HPS) and summation residual harmonics (SRH) operate on the magnitude spectrum and turn it into a function in which the fundamental frequency emerges as argmax. In this paper, we investigate the extension of these three techniques to the phase and group delay (GD) domains. Our extensions exploit the observation that the bin at which F (magnitude) becomes maximum, for some monotonically increasing function F, is equivalent to bin at which F (phase) has maximum negative slope and F (group delay) has the maximum value. To extract the pitch track from speech phase spectrum, these techniques were coupled with the source-filter model in the phase domain that we proposed in earlier publications and a novel voicing detection algorithm proposed here. The accuracy and robustness of the phase-based pitch extraction techniques are illustrated and compared with their magnitude-based counterparts using six pitch evaluation metrics. On average, it is observed that the phase spectrum can be successfully employed in pitch tracking with comparable accuracy and robustness to the speech magnitude spectrum.

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Cite as: Loweimi, E., Barker, J., Hain, T. (2018) On the Usefulness of the Speech Phase Spectrum for Pitch Extraction. Proc. Interspeech 2018, 696-700, DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1062.

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BiBTeX Entry:

@inproceedings{Loweimi2018,
author={Erfan Loweimi and Jon Barker and Thomas Hain},
title={On the Usefulness of the Speech Phase Spectrum for Pitch Extraction},
year=2018,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2018},
pages={696--700},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1062},
url={http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1062} }