Combining Auditory Preprocessing and Bayesian Estimation for Robust Formant Tracking

We present a framework for estimating formant trajectories. Its focus is to achieve high robustness in noisy environments. Our approach combines a preprocessing based on functional principles of the human auditory system and a probabilistic tracking scheme. For enhancing the formant structure in spectrograms we use a Gammatone filterbank, a spectral preemphasis, as well as a spectral filtering using difference-of-Gaussians (DoG) operators. Finally, a contrast enhancement mimicking a competition between filter responses is applied. The probabilistic tracking scheme adopts the mixture modeling technique for estimating the joint distribution of formants. In conjunction with an algorithm for adaptive frequency range segmentation as well as Bayesian smoothing an efficient framework for estimating formant trajectories is derived. Comprehensive evaluations of our method on the VTR-formant database emphasize its high precision and robustness. We obtained superior performance compared to existing approaches for clean as well as echoic noisy speech. Finally, an implementation of the framework within the scope of an online system using instantaneous feature-based resynthesis demonstrates its applicability to real-world scenarios.