Title
A segment selection technique for speaker verification
Abstract
The performance of speaker verification systems degrades considerably when the test segments are utterances of very short duration. This might be either due to variations in score-matching arising from the unobserved speech sounds of short speech utterances or the fact that the shorter the utterance, the greater the effect of individual speech sounds on the average likelihood score. In other words, the effects of individual speech sounds have not been cancelled out by a large number of speech sounds in very short utterances. This paper presents a score-based segment selection technique for discarding portions of speech that result in poor discrimination ability in a speaker verification task. Theory is developed to detect the most significant and reliable speech segments based on the probability that the test segment comes from a fixed set of cohort models. This approach, suitable for any duration of test utterance, reduces the effect of acoustic regions of the speech that are not accurately modelled due to sparse training data, and makes a decision based only on the segments that provide the best-matched scores from the segment selection algorithm. The proposed segment selection technique provides reductions in relative error rate of 22% and 7% in terms of minimum Detection Cost Function (DCF) and Equal Error Rate (EER) compared with a baseline used the segment-based normalization, when evaluated on the short utterances of NIST 2002 Speaker Recognition Evaluation dataset.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1016/j.specom.2010.04.007
Speech Communication
Keywords
Field
DocType
unobserved speech,null hypothesis,individual speech sound,individual speech,reliable speech segment,test segment,short speech utterance,score-based segment selection technique,speaker verification,segment selection,short utterance,segment selection algorithm,proposed segment selection technique,relative error,speech segmentation
Speech processing,Normalization (statistics),Pattern recognition,Computer science,Voice activity detection,Word error rate,Selection algorithm,Utterance,Speech recognition,Speaker recognition,Artificial intelligence,Audio signal processing
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
52
9
Speech Communication
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
7
0.50
17
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mohaddeseh Nosratighods1383.01
Eliathamby Ambikairajah249364.55
Julien Epps31466105.10
Michael John Carey470.50