Open Range Pitch Tracking for Carrier Frequency Difference Estimation from HF Transmitted Speech

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel, efficient method for estimating carrier frequency differences in HF radio signals by analyzing pitch contours in speech, demonstrating improved accuracy over existing methods.

Contribution

It introduces a new power cepstral domain pitch tracking algorithm for carrier frequency difference estimation in HF transmissions, with enhanced accuracy and efficiency.

Findings

Comparable performance to state-of-the-art algorithms

Improved estimation accuracy over existing approaches

Effective on both short and long speech utterances

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the task of detecting carrier frequency differences from demodulated single sideband signals by examining the pitch contours of the received baseband speech signal in the short-time spectral domain. From the detected pitch frequency trajectory and its harmonics a carrier frequency difference, which is caused by demodulating the radio signal with the wrong carrier frequency, can be deduced. A computationally efficient realization in the power cepstral domain is presented. The core component, i.e., the pitch tracking algorithm, is shown to perform comparably to a state of the art algorithm. The full carrier frequency difference estimation system is tested on recordings of real transmissions over HF links. A comparison with an existing approach shows improved estimation accuracy, both on short and longer speech utterances