DP-based determination of F0 contours from speech signals

A new algorithm for the determination of fundamental frequency (F0) contours is presented. For each voiced frame appropriate divisors of the frequency with the maximum energy in the spectrum are taken as F0 candidates. An F0 contour is computed using a dynamic programming (DP) method by minimizing a weighted sum of the diierence between consecutive candidates and the distance of the candidates to a predetermined local target value. With this algorithm a coarse error rate of 0.6% on the frame level and of 6.4% on the sentence level is achieved on a German speech database. On the average the diierence to the reference is 1.9 Hz. Our algorithm outperforms two \conventional" algorithms tested on the same data.