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Formant Estimation and Tracking

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Springer Handbook of Speech Processing

Part of the book series: Springer Handbooks ((SHB))

Abstract

This chapter deals with the estimation and tracking of the movements of the spectral resonances of human vocal tracts, also known as formants. The representation or modeling of speech in terms of formants is useful in several areas of speech processing: coding, recognition, synthesis, and enhancement, as formants efficiently describe essential aspects of speech using a very limited set of parameters. However, estimating formants is more difficult than simply searching for peaks in an amplitude spectrum, as the spectral peaks of vocal-tract output depend upon a variety for factors in complicated ways: vocal-tract shape, excitation, and periodicity. We describe in detail the formal task of formant tracking, and explore its successes and difficulties, as well as giving reasons for the various approaches.

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Abbreviations

ASR:

automatic speech recognition

CZT:

chirp z-transform

DFT:

discrete Fourier transform

DP:

dynamic programming

FFT:

fast Fourier transform

FT:

Fourier transform

LP:

linear prediction

LPC:

linear prediction coefficients

LPC:

linear predictive coding

MFCC:

mel-filter cepstral coefficient

MSE:

mean-square error

STFT:

short-time Fourier transform

TTS:

text-to-speech

VT:

voice tokenization

VTR:

vocal tract resonance

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. INRS Énergie, Matériaux et Télécommunications (INRS-EMT), Université du Québec, 800, de la Gauchetiere Ouest, H5A 1K6, Montréal, Québec, Canada

    Douglas OʼShaughnessy Prof.

Authors
  1. Douglas OʼShaughnessy Prof.
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Douglas OʼShaughnessy Prof. .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. INRS-EMT, University of Quebec, 800 de la Gauchetiere Ouest, H5A 1K6, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Jacob Benesty Dr.

  2. Avayalabs Research, 233 Mount Airy Road, 07920, Basking Ridge, NJ, USA

    M. Mohan Sondhi Ph.D.

  3. Alcatel-Lucent, Bell Laboratories, 600 Mountain Avenue, 07974, Murray Hill, NJ, USA

    Yiteng Arden Huang Dr.

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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OʼShaughnessy, D. (2008). Formant Estimation and Tracking. In: Benesty, J., Sondhi, M.M., Huang, Y.A. (eds) Springer Handbook of Speech Processing. Springer Handbooks. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-49127-9_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-49127-9_11

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-49125-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49127-9

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

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