Joint Bayesian Estimation of Time-Varying LP Parameters and Excitation for Speech

We consider the joint estimation of time-varying linear prediction (TVLP) filter coefficients and the excitation signal parameters for the analysis of long-term speech segments. Traditional approaches to TVLP estimation assume linear expansion of the coefficients in a set of known basis functions only. But, excitation signal is also time-varying, which affects the estimation of TVLP filter parameters. In this letter, we propose a Bayesian approach, to incorporate the nature of excitation signal and also adapt regularization of the filter parameters. Since the order of the system is not known a priori, we formulate a Gaussian prior for the filter parameters, and the excitation signal is modeled as Gaussian with time-varying Gamma distributed precision. We develop an iterative algorithm for the maximum-likelihood estimation of the posterior distribution of filter parameters and the time-varying precision of the excitation signal, along with the parameters of the prior distribution. We show that the proposed method adapts to different types of excitation signals in speech, and also the time-varying system with unknown model order. The spectral modeling performance for synthetic speech-like signals, quantified using the absolute spectral difference shows that the proposed method estimates the system function more accurately compared to several of the traditional methods