Pitch Estimation of Noisy Speech Signals using Empirical Mode Decomposition

This paper presents a pitch estimation method of noisy speech signal using empirical mode decomposition (EMD). The normalized autocorrelation function (NACF) of the noisy speech signal is decomposed into a finite set of band-limited signals termed as intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) using EMD. The periodicity of one IMF is supposed to be equal to the accurate pitch period. A conventional autocorrelation based pitch period detection method is used to select the IMF with pitch period. The accurate pitch period is obtained from the selected IMF. The pitch estimation performance in term of gross pitch error (GPE) of the proposed algorithm is compared with recently proposed methods. The experimental results show that the EMD based algorithm performs better in pitch estimation of noisy speech. Index Terms: empirical mode decomposition, pitch estimation, normalized autocorrelation