A method for glottal formant frequency estimation

Abstract

This study presents a method for estimation of glottal formant frequency (Fg) from speech signals. Our method is based on zeros of z-transform decomposition of speech spectra into two spectra : glottal flow dominated spectrum and vocal tract dominated spectrum. Peak picking is performed on the amplitude spectrum of the glottal flow dominated part. The algorithm is tested on synthetic speech. It is shown to be effective especially when glottal formant and first formant of vocal tract are not too close. In addition, tests on a real speech example are also presented where open quotient estimates from EGG signals are used as reference and correlated with the glottal formant frequency estimates.