A spectral matching method for pitch estimation from noise-corrupted speech

An effective method for pitch estimation from severely noise-corrupted speech is presented in this paper. We argue that an accurate estimate of a pitch-harmonic (PH) can be obtained from the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) power spectrum of an enhanced frame. By exploiting the PH thus extracted, a spectral matching method is developed in the DCT domain to determine the true harmonic number associated to the PH that leads to a pitch estimate. In a heavy noisy scenario, the superior efficacy of the proposed pitch estimation method relative to some of the existing ones is confirmed through simulation results using the Keele database.