Novel auditory motivated subband temporal envelope based fundamental frequency estimation algorithm

We address the problem of estimating the fundamental frequency of voiced speech. We present a novel solution motivated by the importance of amplitude modulation in sound processing and speech perception. The new algorithm is based on a cumulative spectrum computed from the temporal envelope of various subbands. We provide theoretical analysis to derive the new pitch estimator based on the temporal envelope of the bandpass speech signal. We report extensive experimental performance for synthetic as well as natural vowels for both real-world noisy and noise-free data. Experimental results show that the new technique performs accurate pitch estimation and is robust to noise. We also show that the technique is superior to the autocorrelation technique for pitch estimation.