A Fast Harmonic Estimation Method for Low Bit Rate Harmonic Speech Coders

This paper describes a fast harmonic estimation, referred to as Delta Adjustment (DA), using a low resolution pitch. The presented DA method is based on modification of the Generalized Dual Excitation (GDE) technique[1] which was proposed to improve speech enhancement performance. We introduce the GDE technique and modify it to be suitable for low bit rate harmonic coding that uses only an integer pitch estimate. Unlike the GDE, the DA matches a frequency-warped version of the original spectrum that conforms to a fixed pitch at all harmonic bands. In addition, complexity and performance of the presented method are described in comparison with those of the conventional Fractional Pitch (FP) based harmonic estimation. Experimental results showed that the DA algorithm significantly reduces the complexity of the FP method while maintaining the performance.