Pitch Estimation and Voicing Classification Using Reconstructed Spectrum from MFCC

Abstract

In this paper, a novel method for pitch estimation and voicing classification is proposed using reconstructed spectrum from Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC). The proposed algorithm reconstructs spectrum from MFCC with Moore-Penrose pseudo-inverse by Mel-scale weighting functions. The reconstructed spectrum is compressed and filtered in log-frequency. Pitch estimation is achieved by modeling the joint density of pitch frequency and the filter spectrum with Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). Voicing classification is also achieved by GMM-based model, and the test results show that over 99% frames can be correctly classified. The results of pitch estimation demonstrate that the proposed GMM-based pitch estimator has high accuracy, and the relative error is 6.68% on TIMIT database.