Epoch Extraction From Speech Signals

• Main Authors: K. Sri, Rama Murty, B. Yegnanarayana, Senior Member
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arctic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.586.7214; http://speech.iiit.ac.in/svlpubs/article/MurtyK.S.R.Yegna2008.pdf

Abstract—Epoch is the instant of significant excitation of the vocal-tract system during production of speech. For most voiced speech, the most significant excitation takes place around the in-stant of glottal closure. Extraction of epochs from speech is a chal-lenging task due to time-varying characteristics of the source and the system. Most epoch extraction methods attempt to remove the characteristics of the vocal-tract system, in order to emphasize the excitation characteristics in the residual. The performance of such methods depends critically on our ability to model the system. In this paper, we propose a method for epoch extraction which does not depend critically on characteristics of the time-varying vocal-tract system. The method exploits the nature of impulse-like exci-tation. The proposed zero resonance frequency filter output brings out the epoch locations with high accuracy and reliability. The per-formance of the method is demonstrated using CMU-Arctic data-base using the epoch information from the electro-glottograph as reference. The proposed method performs significantly better than the other methods currently available for epoch extraction. The in-teresting part of the results is that the epoch extraction by the pro-posed method seems to be robust against degradations like white noise, babble, high-frequency channel, and vehicle noise. Index Terms—Epoch extraction, glottal closure instant, group-delay, Hilbert envelope, instantaneous frequency. I.