Pole focusing: a new approach to LPC-based speech analysis offering superior formant resolution

The technique presented, termed pole focusing, provides an approach to obtaining high-resolution formant data from the short-time spectrum. Formant estimation is based on modeling the vocal tract frequency response using linear prediction coding (LPC) techniques. However, the pole-focusing technique is the antithesis of standard LPC analysis, in that large model orders are used and preemphasis is not required. The technique involves averaging over several spectral estimates within any single analysis frame, which also aids in conferring very high noise immunity to the estimation process