Pitch Marks at Peaks or Valleys?

This paper deals with the problem of speech waveform polarity. As the polarity of speech waveform can influence the performance of pitch marking algorithms (see Sec. 4), a simple method for the speech signal polarity determination is presented in the paper. We call this problem peak/valley decision making, i.e. making of decision whether pitch marks should be placed at peaks (local maxima) or at valleys (local minima) of a speech waveform. Besides, Besides, the proposed method can be utilized to check the polarity consistence of a speech corpus, which is important for the concatenation of speech units in speech synthesis.