Design and implementation of a robust pitch detector based on a parallel processing technique

The design and implementation of a parallel-processing-based pitch detector is presented. Pitch information is extracted by performing pitch detection on four different waveforms derived from the speech signal. Pitch information from the four pitch-detection processes is then combined to determine a final pitch estimate. The performance of this pitch detector is evaluated on a large database and compared to other well-known pitch detection algorithms. It has been implemented in real time on a TMS32020 fixed-point digital signal processor as part of a 2.4 kb/s vocoder. A performance comparison of the real-time fixed-point implementation and a computer simulation are also given. The results show that the pitch detector performance is maintained in the real-time implementation mainly because the majority of the algorithm computations are integer arithmetic and logic-type operations