A new strategy of formant tracking based on dynamic programming

This paper describes a new method for estimating formant frequencies. It operates in two phases. The first phase, which is similar to a technique developed by Talkin [JASA, vol. 82, S1], finds optimal formant track estimates by imposing frequency continuity constraints using Dynamic Programming (DP). DP is used to select a mapping of candidate frequencies to formant frequencies in oral sonorant regions based on the minimum cost from all possible mappings. The second phase performs a series of postprocessing steps to make formant estimates more robust and accurate and extends the formant estimates into nasal and obstruent regions. Performance statistics comparing the formants obtained with this technique with a set of reference formants using 34 sentences randomly selected from the TIMIT database shows our algorithm gives excellent results when the formants are among the candidate frequencies.