A new approach to pitch and voicing detection through spectrum periodicity measurement

A new method for detecting pitch and voicing information of speech with a high accuracy is addressed. The method is based on a novel approach to using the concept of instantaneous frequency (IF). In this method an IF estimation technique in the frequency domain is employed to expose the harmonic structure of the signal using a periodicity measure. This measure is based on the flatness of the IF, which describes the spectrum periodicity within a certain frequency band where the pitch harmonics are most likely found. The flatness measurement also yields voicing information extracted using an auto-thresholding technique. The proposed method was evaluated through comparison with cepstral pitch and voicing detection considering accuracy and reconstructed speech quality