On the estimation of low fundamental frequencies

In this paper, we analyze the difficult problem of estimating low fundamental frequencies from periodic signals, like those produced by musical instruments. The problem arises when the fundamental frequency is low for a given number of samples as this causes the harmonics to overlap in the frequency domain. Moreover, we demonstrate how the performance of estimators can generally be improved by avoiding the asymptotic approximations that are commonly used in, for example, the harmonic summation method.