A robust on-the-fly pitch (OTFP) estimation algorithm

Pitch detection or fundamental frequency (f0) estimation is a classical research topic and has been extensively studied for many years. Pitch estimation by embedding speech signal into multiple state-space dimensions is a relatively recent technique. Also YIN pitch detection algorithm [1] has been cited recently as an improvement over other standard pitch estimation algorithms. In this paper an attempt is made to present a unifying view on some of these existing and seemingly disparate techniques. The unified view enables the development of robust formulations of some existing definitions and also helps to interpret the limitations of the classical/existing approaches in use. Application of the idea for a robust On-the-Fly pitch (OTFP) detection is demonstrated and comparison with robust YIN pitch detector has yielded encouraging results. The On-The-Fly imposes a constraint that pitch or aperiodicity estimates from past or future speech frames are not to be used at a post processing stage and OTFP outperforms the YIN estimator with this constraint.