Physical principles driven joint evaluation of multiple f0 hypotheses

This article is concerned with the estimation of fundamental frequencies in polyphonic signals for the case when the number of sources is known. We propose a new method for joint evaluation of multiple F0 hypotheses based on three physical principles: harmonicity, spectral smoothness and synchronous amplitude evolution within a single source, which are closely related to source segregation in auditory scene analysis. Given the observed spectrum a set of hypothetic partial sequences is derived and an optimal assignment of the observed peaks to the hypothetic sources and noise is performed. Hypothetic partial sequences are then evaluated by a new score function which formulates the guiding principles in a mathematical manner. The algorithm has been tested on a large collection of artificially mixed polyphonic samples and the encouraging results demonstrate the competitive performance of the proposed method.