Graphical model approach to pitch tracking

Many pitch trackers based on dynamic programming require meticulous design of local cost and transition cost functions. The forms of these functions are often empirically determined and their parameters are tuned accordingly. Parameter tuning usually requires great effort without a guarantee of optimal performance. This work presents a graphical model framework to automatically optimize pitch tracking parameters in the maximum likelihood sense. Therein, probabilistic dependencies between pitch, pitch transition and acoustical observations are expressed using the language of graphical models, and probabilistic inference is accomplished using the Graphical Model Toolkit (GMTK). Experiments show that this framework not only expedites the design of a pitch tracker, but also yields remarkably good performance for both pitch estimation and voicing decision.