Speaker identity verification of spectrally ambiguous and distinguishable speech

Abstract

Feustel et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 83, S55 (1988)] evaluated performance of humans in a speaker identity verification (SIV) task with the intent of improving the performance of a LPC‐cepstral based verification algorithm. This study uses the general methodology and signal processing techniques developed by Feustel et al. to further investigate the nature of potential invariant acoustic information (within a speaker) used by humans to verify a speaker's identity. Subjects were presented natural speech or modified natural speech stimuli drawn from a corpus of spectrally distinguishable and spectrally ambiguous utterances. The results suggest that humans can use information from both the glottal (source) waveform and spectral envelope. Overall, the glottal waveform provides more reliable information. The results will be discussed in this context.