Exploiting Jump-Resonance Hysteresis in Silicon Auditory Front-Ends for Extracting Speaker Discriminative Formant Trajectories

Jump-resonance is a phenomenon observed in non-linear circuits where the amplitude of the output signal exhibits an abrupt jump when the frequency of the input signal is varied. For G_m-C filters used in the design of analog auditory front-ends (AFEs), jump-resonance is generally considered to be undesirable and several techniques have been proposed in literature to avoid or alleviate this artifact. In this paper we explore the use of jump-resonance based hysteresis in G_m-C band-pass filters for encoding speech formant trajectories. Using prototypes of silicon AFEs fabricated in a 0.5 μm CMOS process, we demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach for extracting speaker discriminative features. These benefits are validated using speaker recognition experiments where consistent improvements in equal-error-rates (EERs) are achieved using the jump-resonance based features as compared to conventional features.