Enhanced Maximum Voiced Frequency Estimation Scheme for HTS Using Two-Band Excitation Model

Abstract

In a hidden Markov model based speech synthesis system using a two-band excitation model, a maximum voiced frequency (MVF) is the most important feature as an excitation parameter because the synthetic speech quality depends on the MVF. This paper proposes an enhanced MVF estimation scheme based on a peak picking method. In the proposed scheme, both local peaks and peak lobes are picked from the spectrum of a linear predictive residual signal. The average of the normalized distances of local peaks and peak lobes is calculated and utilized as a feature to estimate an MVF. Experimental results of both objective and subjective tests show that the proposed scheme improves the synthetic speech quality compared with that of a conventional one in a mobile device as well as a PC environment.