Efficient Tracking of Speech Formant Using Closed Phase WRLS-VFF-VT Algorithm

In this paper, we present an adaptive formant tracking algorithm for speech using closed phase WRLS-VFF-VT method. The pitch synchronous closed phase methods is known to give more accurate estimates of the vocal tract parameters than the pitch asynchronous method. However the use of a pitch-synchronous closed phase analysis method has been limited due to difficulties associated with the task of accurately isolating the closed phase region in successive periods of speech. Therefore we have implemented the pitch synchronous closed phase WRLS-VFF-VT algorithm for speech analysis, especially for formant tracking. The proposed algorithm with the variable threshold(VT) can provide a superior performance in the boundary of phone and voiced/unvoiced sound. The proposed method is experimentally compared with the other method such as two channel CPC method by using synthetic waveform and real speech data. From the experimental results, we found that the block data processing techniques, such as the two-channel CPC, gave reasonable estimates of the formant/antiformant. However, the data windows used by these methods included the effects of the periodic excitation pulses, which affected the accuracy of the estimated formants. On the other hand the proposed WRLS-VFF-VT method, which eliminated the influence of the pulse excitation by using an input estimation as part of the algorithm, gave very accurate formant/bandwidth estimates and good spectral matching.