Multi-Pulse Amplitude and Location Estimation by Maximum-Likelihood Estimation in MPE-LPC Speech Synthesis

MPE-LPC음성합성에서 Maximum- Likelihood Estimation에 의한 Multi-Pulse의 크기와 위치 추정

In this paper, we propose a maximum-likelihood estimation(MLE) method to obtain the location and the amplitude of the pulses in MPE( multi-pulse excitation)-LPC speech synthesis using multi-pulses as excitation source. This MLE method computes the value maximizing the likelihood function with respect to unknown parameters(amplitude and position of the pulses) for the observed data sequence. Thus in the case of overlapped pulses, the method is equivalent to Ozawa's crosscorrelation method, resulting in equal amount of computation and sound quality with the cross-correlation method. We show by computer simulation: the multi-pulses obtained by MLE method are(1) pseudo-periodic in pitch in the case of voicde sound, (2) the pulses are random for unvoiced sound, (3) the pulses change from random to periodic in the interval where the original speech signal changes from unvoiced to voiced. Short time power specta of original speech and syunthesized speech obtained by using multi-pulses as excitation source are quite similar to each other at the formants.