A multi-level representation of f0 using the continuous wavelet transform and the Discrete Cosine Transform

Abstract

We propose a representation of f0 using the Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) and the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). The CWT decomposes the signal into various scales of selected frequencies, while the DCT compactly represents complex contours as a weighted sum of cosine functions. The proposed approach has the advantage of combining signal decomposition and higher-level representations, thus modeling low-frequencies at higher levels and high-frequencies at lower-levels. Objective results indicate that this representation improves f0 prediction over traditional short-term approaches. Subjective results show that improvements are seen over the typical MSD-HMM and are comparable to the recently proposed CWT-HMM, while using less parameters. These results are discussed and future lines of research are proposed.