A Processing Method for Pitch Smoothing Based on Autocorrelation and Cepstral F0 Detection Approaches

Chinese is known as a syllabic and tonal language and tone recognition plays an important role and provides very strong discriminative information for Chinese speech recognition [1]. Usually, the tone classification is based on the F0 (fundamental frequency) contours [2]. It is possible to infer a speaker´s gender, age and emotion from his/her pitch, regardless of what is said. Meanwhile, the same sequence of words can convey very different meanings with variations in intonation. However, accurate pitch detection is difficult partly because tracked pitch contours are not ideal smooth curves. In this paper, we present a new smoothing algorithm for detected pitch contours. The effectiveness of the proposed method was shown using the HUB4-NE [3] natural speech corpus.