Combining stochastic feature transformation and handset identification for telephone-based speaker verification

The performance of telephone-based speaker verification systems can be severely degraded by the acoustic mismatch caused by telephone handsets. This paper proposes to combine a handset selector with stochastic feature transformation to reduce the mismatch. Specifically, a GMM-based handset selector is trained to identify the most likely handset used by the claimants, and then handset-specific stochastic feature transformations are applied to the distorted feature vectors. To overcome the non-linear distortion introduced by telephone handsets, a 2nd-order stochastic feature transformation is proposed. Estimation algorithms based on the stochastic matching technique and the EM algorithm are derived. Experimental results based on 150 speakers of the HTIMIT corpus show that the handset selector is able to identify the handsets accurately (98.3%), and that both linear and non-linear transformation reduce the error rate significantly (from 12.37% to 5.49%).