Patent ID: 7353167

Claim:
An apparatus for generating an identification signal comprising: a voice signal receiver; and a translator having as its input a voice signal received by said voice signal receiver and having as its output a representation of discrete tones where an audio presentation of said discrete tones would be human-recognizable as a translation of said voice signal; wherein said translator further comprises a feature estimation module to determine values for at least one time-varying feature of said input signal; wherein said translator further comprises a segmented module responsive to output of said feature estimation module and energy of said input to segment said input signal into notes and a pitch assignment module responsive to signal energy in each segment output by said segmentation module; wherein said pitch assignment module comprises an intranote pitch assignment subsystem and an internote pitch assignment subsystem; and wherein said intranote pitch assignment subsystem determines pitch in response to time-domain energy, voicing probability, median, and mode of each said segment output by said segmentation module.