Comparing B-Spline and Spline Models for F0 Modelling

Abstract

This article describes a new approach to estimate F 0 curves using B-spline and Spline models characterized by a knot sequence and associated control points. The free parameters of the model are the number of knots and their location. The free-knot placement, which is a NP-hard problem, is done using a global MLE (Maximum Likelihood Estimation) within a simulated-annealing strategy. Experiments are conducted in a speech processing context on a 7000 syllables french corpus. We estimate the two challenging models for increasing values of the number of free parameters. We show that a B-spline model provides a slightly better improvement than the Spline model in terms of RMS error.KeywordsSpline FunctionSpline ModelQuadratic SplineQuadratic DistanceMelodic ContourThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.