A vector quantization approach to speaker recognition

In this study a vector quantization (VQ) codebook was used as an efficient means of characterizing the short-time spectral features of a speaker. A set of such codebooks were then used to recognize the identity of an unknown speaker from his/her unlabelled spoken utterances based on a minimum distance (distortion) classification rule. A series of speaker recognition experiments was performed using a 100-talker (50 male and 50 female) telephone recording database consisting of isolated digit utterances. For ten random but different isolated digits, over 98% speaker identification accuracy was achieved. The effects, on performance, of different system parameters such as codebook sizes, the number of test digits, phonetic richness of the text, and difference in recording sessions were also studied in detail.