A Novel Two-Level Pitch Detection Approach for Speaker Tracking in Robot Control

Using natural speech commands for controlling a human-robot is an interesting topic in the field of robotics. In this paper, our main focus is on the verification of a speaker who gives a command to decide whether he/she is an authorized person for commanding. Among possible dynamic features of natural speech, pitch period is one of the most important ones for characterizing speech signals and it differs usually from person to person. However, current techniques of pitch detection are still not to a desired level of accuracy and robustness. When the signal is noisy or there are multiple pitch streams, the performance of most techniques degrades. In this paper, we propose a two-level approach for pitch detection which in compare with standard pitch detection algorithms, not only increases accuracy, but also makes the performance more robust to noise. In the first level of the proposed approach we discriminate voiced from unvoiced signals based on a neural classifier that utilizes cepstrum sequences of speech as an input feature set. Voiced signals are then further processed in the second level using a modified standard AMDF-based pitch detection algorithm to determine their pitch periods precisely. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the proposed system is better than those of conventional pitch detection algorithms for speech signals in clean and noisy environments.