New approach to pitch and voicing detection through spectrum periodicity measurement

A new method for detecting pitch and voicing information of speech with a high accuracy is addressed. The method is based on a novel approach to using the concept of Instantaneous Frequency (IF). In this method, an IF estimation technique in frequency domain is employed to expose harmonic structure of the signal using a periodicity measure. This measure is based on the flatness of the IF, which describes the spectrum periodicity within a certain frequency band where the pitch harmonics are most likely found. The flatness measurement also yields voicing information extracted using an auto-thresholding technique. The proposed method was evaluated through comparison with cepstral pitch and voicing detection considering accuracy and reconstructed speech quality.