Signal Processing Ideas

The Trigger:
a need for a pitch estimation method that keeps track of the speaker under interest. In other words a method that knows what to follow in order not to lose the pitch trajectory even in case of having other active speakers in background (cocktail party effect).

Method Description:
The “what to follow” was the main question… I picked up the auditory model-based pitch estimation method, the block scheme of which is depicted below..

.. and designed the “Enhance + summa” module in a way that it can accept feedback information form the estimated pitch value, and boost the estimation, if it was correct:

The block scheme clearly indicates that the answer to the “what to follow?” question is the “formant envelopes”, sampled at the estimated pitch value. Below an example, showing the internal states of the estimation module while enhancing the channels belonging to one speaker, with another active speaker in the background.

References:
[1] Képesi, M.: “Auditory Model-Based Tracking of Mixed Acoustic sources,” Proc. of SPRA 2003, Rhodos, Greece 2003.

Links:
More detailed description here.

This entry was posted on December 7, 2008 at 10:30 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.