Fundamental Frequency Estimation in Speech Signals With Variable Rate Particle Filters

Fundamental frequency estimation, known as pitch estimation in speech signals is of interest both to the research community and to industry. Meanwhile, the particle filter is known to be a powerful Bayesian inference method to track dynamic parameters in nonlinear state-space models. In this paper, we propose a speech model under a time-varying source-filter speech model, and use variable rate particle filters (VRPF) to develop methods for estimation of pitch periods in speech signals. A Rao-Blackwellised variable rate particle filter (RBVRPF) is also implemented. The proposed VRPF and RBVRPF are compared with a state-of-the-art pitch estimation algorithm, the YIN algorithm. Simulation results show that more accurate estimation of pitch can be obtained by VRPF and RBVRPF even under strong background noise conditions.