An adaptive penalty approach to multi-pitch estimation

Abstract

This work treats multi-pitch estimation, and in particular the common misclassification issue wherein the pitch at half of the true fundamental frequency, here referred to as a suboctave, is chosen instead of the true pitch. Extending on current methods which use an extension of the Group LASSO for pitch estimation, this work introduces an adaptive total variation penalty, which both enforce group-and block sparsity, and deal with errors due to sub-octaves. The method is shown to outperform current state-of-the-art sparse methods, where the model orders are unknown, while also requiring fewer tuning parameters than these. The method is also shown to outperform several conventional pitch estimation methods, even when these are virtued with oracle model orders.