Patent ID: 7860708

Claim:
An apparatus for extracting pitch information from a speech signal, the apparatus comprising: a pilot pitch detector for extracting predicted pitch information from a frame of an input speech signal; a pitch candidate value selector for selecting one or more pitch candidate values from the predicted pitch information according to a predetermined condition; a harmonic-noise region decomposer for distinguishing a harmonic region from a noise region through amplification of the harmonic region and attenuation of the noise region in a frequency domain, and decomposing the harmonic region and the noise region using each of the selected pitch candidate values when the harmonic region has been amplified and the noise region has been attenuated such that an energy difference between two consecutive harmonic regions is below a threshold; a harmonic-noise energy ratio calculator for calculating an energy ratio of the decomposed harmonic region to each of the decomposed harmonic noise regions; and a pitch information selector for selecting a pitch candidate value of a harmonic-noise region in which maximum value among the calculated harmonic-noise energy ratio exists as a pitch value of the input frame of the speech signal.