Fast and robust joint estimation of vocal tract and voice source parameters

Abstract

A new pitch-synchronous method of joint estimation is described to estimate vocal tract and voice source parameters from speech signals based on an autoregressive model with an exogenous input (ARX) model. The method uses Kalman filtering to estimate the time-varying coefficients and simulated annealing to deal with the non-linear optimization of Rosenberg-Klatt parameters. A compact method is suggested in the algorithm in order to reduce the computation cost. Further, an automatic model order selection method is proposed to determine the proper analysis pole-order of the ARX model, based on the estimated formant bandwidths. The new method has been shown to be much faster than our previous method and the order selection technique has been shown to be effective. Finally, an ATR two-channel speech database including varying sentence-level prominence patterns is used to verify the proposed method.