A new paradigm for reliable automatic formant tracking

A new algorithm for tracking formants automatically is presented. From rough formant hypotheses a regularization method is used to provide formant trajectories both close to the spectrogram edge lines and sufficiently regular. The formant hypotheses are obtained by labelling edge lines of LPC or cepstrally smoothed spectrograms in terms of formants. Speech knowledge, in the form of admissible domains for F1, F2, F3, F1 vs. F2, F2 vs. F3 and of formant level is used to obtain consistent labellings. The advantage of this algorithm is that it provides reliable formant trajectories especially in regions where a knowledge of the formant transitions give important information about the location of articulation for consonants. We present very encouraging tracking results on a corpus of sentences consisting of stops and vowels