A Modulation Property of Time-Frequency Derivatives of Filtered Phase and its Application to Aperiodicity and fo Estimation

We introduce a simple and linear SNR (strictly speaking, periodic to random power ratio) estimator (0 dB to 80 dB without additional calibration/linearization) for providing reliable descriptions of aperiodicity in speech corpus. The main idea of this method is to estimate the background random noise level without directly extracting the background noise. The proposed method is applicable to a wide variety of time windowing functions with very low sidelobe levels. The estimate combines the frequency derivative and the time-frequency derivative of the mapping from filter center frequency to the output instantaneous frequency. This procedure can replace the periodicity detection and aperiodicity estimation subsystems of recently introduced open source vocoder, YANG vocoder. Source code of MATLAB implementation of this method will also be open sourced.