Speaker recognition in conjunction with speaker independent word recognition

Abstract

Our method for accomplishing speaker independent word recognition is to select a small set of word templates that typify and span individual speaker reference templates obtained from a large population of speakers. An unknown utterance is processed and compared with a set of such templates for each word in the vocabulary. Word recognition decision functions are based on combinations of template distances obtained in the comparison. In this study it is hypothesized that distributions of template distance scores are reasonably consistent for individual speakers and vary characteristically from speaker to speaker. This property is exploited to provide a speaker recognition capability in conjunction with speaker independent word recognition. It is shown that good speaker identification performance is dependent on the input of a sequence of distinct words. For a 20 speaker experimental population a mean speaker identification error less than 1% is obtained over a sequence of seven distinct words. Techniques are also described for grouping individual speaker references into class references.