A performance comparison of pitch extraction algorithms for noisy speech

Results of a performance comparison study of eight pitch extraction algorithms for noisy as well as clean speech are presented. These algorithms are the autocorrelation method with center clipping, the autocorrelation method with modified center clipping, the simplified inverse filter tracking (SIFT) method, the average magnitude difference function (AMDF) method, the pitch detection method based on LPC inverse filtering and AMDF, the data reduction method, the parallel processing method and the cepstrum method. It has been found that for pitch detection of noisy speech the algorithm that uses an AMDF or an autocorrelation function yields relatively good performance than others. A pitch detector that uses center clipped speech as an input signal is effective in pitch extraction of noisy speech. In general, preprocessing such as LPC inverse filtering or center clipping of input speech yields remarkable improvement in pitch detection.