Pitch determination using autocorrelation function in spectral domain

This paper proposes a pitch determination method utilizing the autocorrelation function in the spectral domain. The autocorrelation function is a popular measurement in estimating pitch in time domain. The performance of the method, however, is effected due to the position of dominant harmonics (usually the first formant) and the presence of spurious peaks introduced in noisy conditions. We applied a series of operations to obtain a noise-compensated and flattened version of the amplitude spectrum which takes a shape of harmonics train. Application of the autocorrelation function on this preconditioned spectrum produces a sequence where the true pitch peak can be readily located. Experiments on long speech signals spoken by a number of male and female speakers have been conducted. Experimental results demonstrate the merit of the proposed method when compared with other popular methods.