Functional demarcation of pitch

Abstract

A satisfactory solution is yet to be found for the problem of estimating the pitch of speech signals. It is difficult even to evolve objective criteria to evaluate existing algorithms. This is usually done on the basis of complexity of the algorithm, speed of computation, ease of implementation, etc. Even the verification of the results of one particular technique is difficult. This paper presents three functional demarcations of pitch estimation methods (based on the linear model of speech production, analysis of the short-time spectrum and examination of the time domain signal, respectively) as used for speech processing. It is shown that evaluation and comparison of different algorithms becomes consistent and easy within each demarcation. Also, methods falling within each demarcation are shown to be suited for a particular area of speech processing.