Pitch Mean Based Frequency Warping

Abstract

In this paper, a novel pitch mean based frequency warping (PMFW) method is proposed to reduce the pitch variability in speech signals at the front-end of speech recognition. The warp factors used in this process are calculated based on the average pitch of a speech segment. Two functions to describe the relations between the frequency warping factor and the pitch mean are defined and compared. We use a simple method to perform frequency warping in the Mel-filter bank frequencies based on different warping factors. To solve the problem of mismatch in bandwidth between the original and the warped spectra, the Mel-filters selection strategy is proposed. At last, the PMFW mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) is extracted based on the regular MFCC with several modifications. Experimental results show that the new PMFW MFCCs are more distinctive than the regular MFCCs.