Age Approximation from Speech Using Gaussian Mixture Models

In this work, spectral features are extracted from speech to perform speaker classification based on their age. Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) are explored as features. Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) are proposed as classifiers. The age groups considered in this study are 1-10, 11-20, 21-30, 31-40 and 41-50. The age group database used in this work is recorded in Hindi from speakers of different ages and dialects containing five Hindi text prompts. The text prompts are constructed using textually neutral Hindi words recorded in neutral emotion which are used for characterizing the age group, for both male and female. Average age recognition performance, in the case of multiple speaker database is observed to be around 92.0%.