Pitch estimation for noisy speech signals using synthetic bone-conducted speech

This paper shows that the Bone-Conducted (BC) speech is more suitable than the corresponding Air-Conducted (AC) speech for detecting the pitch of speech in noisy environments. To utilize the robustness against the background noise of BC speech, a bone conduction filter being an Infinite Impulse Response filter (IIR) is used to produce BC speech from AC speech, and then pitch detection is performed based on the autocorrelation approach. Several types of noise characteristic of white, babble, factory, Volvo, pink, HF channel, train, and military vehicle noises are considered and the effect of the bone-conduction filter for pitch detection is examined and discussed. Experiments demonstrate that pitch detection based on BC speech outperforms that on AC speech at both low and high signal-to-noise ratios, especially in HF channel noise.