Default Bayesian Estimation of the Fundamental Frequency

Joint fundamental frequency and model order estimation is an important problem in several applications. In this paper, a default estimation algorithm based on a minimum of prior information is presented. The algorithm is developed in a Bayesian framework, and it can be applied to both real- and complex-valued discrete-time signals which may have missing samples or may have been sampled at a non-uniform sampling frequency. The observation model and prior distributions corresponding to the prior information are derived in a consistent fashion using maximum entropy and invariance arguments. Moreover, several approximations of the posterior distributions on the fundamental frequency and the model order are derived, and one of the state-of-the-art joint fundamental frequency and model order estimators is demonstrated to be a special case of one of these approximations. The performance of the approximations are evaluated in a small-scale simulation study on both synthetic and real world signals. The simulations indicate that the proposed algorithm yields more accurate results than previous algorithms. The simulation code is available online.