Extraction of speaker-specific excitation information from linear prediction residual of speech

Abstract

In this paper, through different experimental studies we demonstrate that the excitation component of speech can be exploited for speaker recognition studies. Linear prediction (LP) residual is used as a representation of excitation information in speech. The speaker-specific information in the excitation of voiced speech is captured using the AutoAssociative Neural Network (AANN) models. The decrease in the error during training and recognizing correct speakers during testing demonstrates that the excitation component of speech contains speaker-specific information and is indeed being captured by the AANN models. The study on the effect of different LP orders demonstrates that for a speech signal sampled at 8 kHz, the LP residual extracted using LP order in the range 8-20 best represents the speaker-specific excitation information. It is also demonstrated that the proposed speaker recognition system using excitation information and AANN models requires significantly less amount of data both during training as well as testing, compared to the speaker recognition system using vocal tract information. Finally the speaker recognition studies on NIST 2002 database demonstrates that even though, the recognition performance from the excitation information alone is poor, when combined with evidence from vocal tract information, there is significant improvement in the performance. This result demonstrates the complementary nature of the excitation component of speech.