Using optimal transport for estimating inharmonic pitch signals

Abstract

In this work, we propose a novel multi-pitch estimation technique that is robust with respect to the inharmonicity commonly occurring in many applications. The method does not require any a priori knowledge of the number of signal sources, the number of harmonics of each source, nor the structure or scope of any possibly occurring inharmonicity. Formulated as a minimum transport distance problem, the proposed method finds an estimate of the present pitches by mapping any found spectral line to the closest harmonic structure. The resulting optimization is a convex and highly tractable linear programming problem. The preferable performance of the proposed method is illustrated using both simulated and real audio signals.