A Robust Non-Parametric and Filtering Based Approach for Glottal Closure Instant Detection

In this paper, a novel non-parametric based glottal closure instant (GCI) detection method after filtering the speech signal through a pulse shaping filter is proposed. The pulse shaping filter essentially de-emphasises the vocal tract resonances by emphasising the frequency components containing the pitch information. The filtered signal is subjected to non-linear processing to emphasise the GCI locations. The GCI locations are finally obtained by a non-parametric histograms based approach in the detected voiced regions from the filtered speech signal. The proposed method is compared with the two state-of-theart epoch extraction methods : Zero frequency filtering (ZFF) and SEDREAMS (both of which requires upfront knowledge of average pitch period). The performance of the method is evaluated on the complete CMU-ARCTIC dataset consisting of both speech and Electroglottograph (EGG) signals. The robustness of the proposed method to the additive white noise is evaluated with several degradation levels. The experimental results showed that the proposed method is indeed immune to noise and the obtained results are comparably better than the two state-ofthe-art methods.