The fourth order cumulant of speech signals applied to pitch estimation

In a number of speech applications, such as coding, synthesis or recognition, it is crucial to make a reliable discrimination between voiced/unvoiced segments and accurately determine the pitch period. The problem of an accurate estimation and decision in noisy condition remains open higher-order statistics (H.O.S) have inherent properties that make them well suited when dealing with a mixture of Gaussian and non-Gaussian processes. This paper explores the fourth order cumulant using autoregressive (AR(p)) and presents a new algorithm for pitch detection of voiced sounds with and without colored Gaussian noise and shows the superiority of the novel method over the classical methods such as cepstral method.