Efficient periodicity extraction based on sine-wave representation and its application to pitch determination of speech signals

This paper presents a novel low-complexity method for extracting periodicity of signals based on their sine-wave representation. In this representation, the signal is modeled as a finite sum of sine-waves, with time-varying amplitudes, phases and frequencies. We describe how one can modify the familiar spectral-comb analysis method to obtain a guaranteed and effective procedure to find the fundamental-frequency which gives the best harmonic approximation of the signal spectrum. The search is efficiently carried out in the frequency domain. The procedure obtains a successive refinement of possible pitch values which are consistent with an increasing number of sine wave components. Other pitch intervals are pruned at an early stage of the search. The advantage of this algorithm is its high accuracy achieved at a relatively low complexity. We also briefly describe one possible application in the area of pitch determination of speech signals.