Pitch and voiced/unvoiced determination with an auditory model

In this paper, an accurate pitch and voiced/unvoiced determination algorithm for speech analysis is described. The algorithm is called AMPEX (auditory model-based pitch extractor) and it performs a temporal analysis of the outputs emerging from a new auditory model. However, in spite of its use of an auditory model, AMPEX should not be regarded as a substitute for any psychophysical theory of human auditory pitch perception. What is mainly described is the design of a computationally efficient auditory model, the perceptually motivated determination of the model parameters, the conception of a reliable pitch extractor for speech analysis, and the elaboration of an experimental procedure for evaluating the performance of such a pitch extractor. In the course of the evaluation experiment several kinds of speech stimuli including clean speech, bandpass-filtered speech, and noisy speech were presented to three different pitch extractors. The experimental results clearly indicate that AMPEX outperforms the best algorithms available.