Measuring fine structure in speech: application to speaker identification

The performance of systems for speaker identification (SID) can be quite good with clean speech, though much lower with degraded speech. Thus it is useful to search for new features for SID, particularly features that are robust over a degraded channel. This paper investigates features that are based on amplitude and frequency modulations of speech formants, high resolution measurement of fundamental frequency and location of “secondary pulses”, measured using a high-resolution energy operator. When these features are added to traditional features using an existing SID system with a 168 speaker telephone speech database, SID performance improved by as much as 4% for male speakers and 8.2% for female speakers