Robust formant tracking for continuous speech with speaker variability

  • Authors:
  • K. Mustafa;I. C. Bruce

  • Affiliations:
  • Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., McMaster Univ., Hamilton, Ont., Canada;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Several algorithms have been developed for tracking formant frequency trajectories of speech signals, however most of these algorithms are either not robust in real-life noise environments or are not suitable for real-time implementation. The algorithm presented in this paper obtains formant frequency estimates from voiced segments of continuous speech by using a time-varying adaptive filterbank to track individual formant frequencies. The formant tracker incorporates an adaptive voicing detector and a gender detector for formant extraction from continuous speech, for both male and female speakers. The algorithm has a low signal delay and provides smooth and accurate estimates for the first four formant frequencies at moderate and high signal-to-noise ratios. Thorough testing of the algorithm has shown that it is robust over a wide range of signal-to-noise ratios for various types of background noises.