Hybrid electroglottograph and speech signal based algorithm for pitch marking

Pitch marking is very significant in speech signal processing. In a text-to-speech (TTS) system based on the Time-Domain Pitch-Synchronous Overlap-Add (TD-PSOLA) method, robust estimation of pitch marks (PM) is especially important to the modification of the time and pitch scale of a speech signal in order to match it to that of the target speaker. The aim of this paper is to improve the accuracy of automatic Pitch Mark Algorithms (PMA). Therefore, we propose a hybrid method for pitch marking that combines the advantages of the Electroglottograph (EGG) and the speech signals. We evaluate this hybrid algorithm for pitch marking against pitch mark algorithm used by Praat program [1]. The results of the evaluation indicate that the suggested method provides better performance than PMA based on EGG signal or speech signal.