Formant contour estimation in noise: comparison of a new zero-crossing based method with other spectral estimators

Abstract

The authors present a method of spectral analysis for formant estimation, using statistical properties of zero-crossing (ZC) intervals of the signal. The technique provides noise robustness using an initial stage of filter-bank analysis. The method is compared with other existing spectral analysis techniques for their performance in formant estimation using a hand-marked speed database. It is found that the ZC method performs best for estimating the first formant frequency at high noise levels ( >