Significance of duration modification for speaker verification under mismatch speech tempo condition

Abstract

This work explores the scope of duration modification for speaker verification (SV) under mismatch speech tempo condition. The SV performance is found to depend on speaking rate of a speaker. The mismatch in the speaking rate can degrade the performance of a system and is crucial from the perspective of deployable systems. In this work, an analysis of SV performance is carried out by varying the speaking rate of train and test speech. Based on the studies, a framework is proposed to compensate the mismatch in speech tempo. The framework changes the duration of test speech in terms of speaking rate according to the derived mismatch factor between train and test speech. This in turn matches speech tempo of the test speech to that of the claimed speaker model. The proposed approach is found to have significant impact on SV performance while comparing the performance under mismatch conditions. A set of practical data having mismatch in speech tempo is also used to cross-validate the framework.