EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing 
Volume 2006 (2006), Article ID 67960, 16 pages
doi:10.1155/ASP/2006/67960

A Robust Formant Extraction Algorithm Combining Spectral Peak Picking and Root Polishing

Chanwoo Kim,1 Kwang-deok Seo,2 and Wonyong Sung3

 1School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh 15213-3891, PA, USA
2Computer and Telecommunications Engineering Division, Yonsei University, Wonju, Gangwon 220-710, Korea
3School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Seoul National University, Gwanak-gu, Seoul 151-744, Korea
Received 22 September 2004; Revised 27 July 2005; Accepted 22 August 2005

Recommended by Ulrich Heute

Abstract

We propose a robust formant extraction algorithm that combines the spectral peak picking, formants location examining for peak merger checking, and the root extraction methods. The spectral peak picking method is employed to locate the formant candidates, and the root extraction is used for solving the peak merger problem. The location and the distance between the extracted formants are also utilized to efficiently find out suspected peak mergers. The proposed algorithm does not require much computation, and is shown to be superior to previous formant extraction algorithms through extensive tests using TIMIT speech database.