Evaluation of Performance of Several Established Pitch Detection Algorithms in Pathological Voices

Robust pitch estimation is important in many areas of speech processing. In voice pathology, diverse statistics extracted form pitch estimation were commonly used to test voice quality. In this study, we compared several established pitch detection algorithms (PDAs) for verification of adequacy of the PDAs. In the database of total pathological voices of 99 and normal voices of 30, an analysis of errors related with pitch detection was evaluated between pathological and normal voices, or among the types of pathological voices. Pitch errors of all PDAs used in this study more or less showed some changes between pathological and normal voices. According to the results of pitch errors, gross pitch error showed some increases in cases of pathological voices; especially excessive increase in PDA based on nonlinear time-series. In an analysis of types of pathological voices classified by aperiodicity and the degree of chaos, the more voice has aperiodic and chaotic, the more growth of pitch errors increased. Consequently, it is required to survey the severity of tested voice in order to obtain accurate pitch estimates.