Pitch Extraction Using Half-wave Rectification in Narrow-Band Noise

In this paper, we propose a pitch extraction method effective in narrow-band noise. We first use the fourth-root spectrum instead of the logarithm spectrum by reducing the effect of noise. The noise-free fourth-root spectrum is then flattened inspired by the lifter approach for reducing the effect of vocal tract characteristics. In our proposed method, we use the half-wave rectification approach instead of clipping operation on liftered spectrum to suppress the noise effect and maintain the periodicity in between the harmonics. Therefore, we can extract the more accurate pitch. Through experiments, the excellent pitch extraction performance of the proposed method is validated. It is also shown that the computation of the proposed method is and fast.