Pitch contour stylization using an optimal piecewise polynomial approximation

We propose a dynamic programming (DP) based piecewise polynomial approximation of discrete data such that the L₂ norm of the approximation error is minimized. We apply this technique for the stylization of speech pitch contour. Objective evaluation verifies that the DP based technique indeed yields minimum mean square error (MSE) compared to other approximation methods. Subjective evaluation reveals that the quality of the synthesized speech using stylized pitch contour obtained by the DP method is almost identical to that of the original speech.