Abstract
Speech classification into voiced and unvoiced (or silent) portions is important in many speech processing applications. In addition, segmentation of voiced speech into individual pitch epochs is necessary in several high quality speech synthesis and coding techniques. This paper introduces criteria for measuring the performance of automatic procedures performing this task against manually segmented and labeled data. First, five basic pitch determination algorithms (PDAs) (SIFT, comb filter energy maximization, spectrum decimation/accumulation, optimal temporal similarity and dyadic wavelet transform) are evaluated and their performance is analyzed. A set of enhancements is then developed and applied to the basic algorithms, which yields superior performance by virtually eliminating multiple and sub-multiple pitch assignment errors and reducing all other errors. Evaluation shows that the enhancements improved performance of all five PDAs with the improvement ranging from 3.5% for the comb filter energy maximization method to 8.3% for the dyadic wavelet transform method.
