Evaluation of a New Beam-Search Formant Tracking Algorithm in Noisy Environments

• Published in: Advances in Speech and Language Technologies for Iberian Languages pp. 40 - 48
• Main Authors: Ribas González, Dayana, García Laínez, José Enrique, Miguel, Antonio, Ortega Gimenez, Alfonso, Lleida, Eduardo, Calvo de Lara, José Ramón
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2012
• Series: Communications in Computer and Information Science
• Subjects: beam-search algorithm; formant tracking; noisy environments
• ISBN: 9783642352911; 364235291X
• ISSN: 1865-0929; 1865-0937
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-35292-8_5

In this work we present the experimental evaluation of a new beam-search formant tracking algorithm under noisy conditions and compare its performance with three formant tracking methods. The proposed formant tracking algorithm makes use of the roots of the polynomial of a Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) as formant candidates. The best combination of formant candidates respect to a defined cost function are selected applying a beam-search algorithm. The cost function makes use of information about local and neighbor frames using trajectory functions in order to preserve the dynamics of the frequency of formants. Experiments were carried out with a subset of the TIMIT database, contaminated with various types and levels of noises. The results show that the beam-search formant tracker have a robust behavior in noisy environments and it is clearly more precise than the rest of compared methods.