Pitch Period Segmentation of Speech Signals

A method for automatic segmentation of pitch periods of speech waveforms takes a speech waveform, a corresponding fundamental frequency contour of the speech waveform, that can be computed by some standard fundamental frequency detection algorithm, and optionally the voicing information of the speech waveform, that can be computed by some standard voicing detection algorithm, as inputs and calculates the corresponding pitch period boundaries of the speech waveform as outputs by iteratively •calculating the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) of a speech segment having a length of approximately two periods, the period being calculated as the inverse of the mean fundamental frequency associated with these speech segments, •placing the pitch period boundary either at the position where the phase of the third FFT coefficient is −180 degrees, or at the position where the correlation coefficient of two speech segments shifted within the two period long analysis frame maximizes, or at a position calculated as a combination of both measures stated above, and repeatedly shifting the analysis frame one period length further until the end of the speech waveform is reached.