A new approach to the estimation of the vocal tract area function

The authors present a novel method for estimating the area function of the vocal tract based on the magnitude of the Fourier transform of the speech signal and area(s) at some point(s) along the vocal tract. This method allows for incorporation of any available knowledge about the vocal tract in the solution. This iterative method is based on a combination of signal extrapolation and phase retrieval. Results obtained from synthesized speech show that the method converges to a realistic solution after a small number of iterations.<>