Performance Evaluation of Novel AMDF-Based Pitch Detection Scheme

Abstract

A novel average magnitude difference function (AMDF)-based pitch detection scheme (PDS) is proposed to achieve better performance in speech quality. A performance evaluation of the proposed PDS is carried out through both a simulation and a real-time implementation of a speech analysis-synthesis system. The parameters used to compare the performance of the proposed PDS with that of PDSs that are based on either a cepstrum, an autocorrelation function (ACF), an AMDF, or circular AMDF (CAMDF) methods are as follows: percentage gross pitch error (%GPE); a subjective listening test; an objective speech quality assessment; a speech intelligibility test; a synthesized speech waveform; computation time; and memory consumption. The proposed PDS results in lower %GPE and better synthesized speech quality and intelligibility for different speech signals as compared to the cepstrum-, ACF-, AMDF-, and CAMDF-based PDSs. The computational time of the proposed PDS is also less than that for the cepstrum-, ACF-, and CAMDF-based PDSs. Moreover, the total memory consumed by the proposed PDS is less than that for the ACF- and cepstrum-based PDSs.