[语音信号处理]实时语音显示系统和语音活性检测VAD[MATLAB实现]

Background:

Fundamental frequency is a basic feature of speech signal. Nowadays, it has been widely used to in both research and practical use. With fundamental frequency, we get another criterion for speaker identification. Also, in musical instrument market, it has been used to adjust and improve the sound quality. 

Principle:

We use time domain method: autocorrelation to finish this task.

The procedure is show in the picture below:

Preprocess (center clip):

If we take an autocorrelation of a frame of speech signal, it will contain too much information. Specifically, the result will have too many peaks, most of which are attributed to the damped oscillations of the vocal tract response. Thus, some rapidly changing formants frequencies can create confusion to the detection of pitch.

  To avoid this problem, we will use a method called “center clipping ” to preprocess the signal. It is actually a non-linear transformation.

yn=C[xn]

Through this preprocessing, the peaks are converted to short pulses consisting of the part of each peak that exceeds the clipping level.

Autocorrelation:

The short-time autocorrelation function is defined by:

Where wm is a window defined over 0≤m≤L-1. This reflects the periodicity of a frame of signal.

Local maximum value:

Due to the periodicity of pitch, the result of autocorrelation speech signal will present peaks periodically. And we just need to locate the index of the peak closest to origin to acquire the period.