Interpolation of pitch contour using temporal decomposition

A new method for predicting pitch contour of a speech signal using a small number of pitch values is addressed, for the application of very low rate speech coding, relying on the correlation between phonetic evolution and pitch variations during voiced speech segments. To track the phonetic evolution and specify perceptually significant time points, Temporal Decomposition (TD) is used. TD provides information required for both determination of critical pitch values and estimation of pitch contour by detecting event functions, as interpolation paths, and their centroids, as the most steady points, in the spectral parameters space. It is shown that the proposed method reduces the amount of pitch information to about one-tenth of that in conventional frame-by-frame based techniques with less than 5% error in pitch approximation.