Nonparametric Speaker Recognition Method Using Earth Mover's Distance

Shingo KUROIWA  Yoshiyuki UMEDA  Satoru TSUGE  Fuji REN 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems  Vol.E89-D  No.3  pp.1074-1081
Publication Date: 2006/03/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Statistical Modeling for Speech Processing)
Category: Speaker Recognition
Keyword: 
distributed speaker recognition,  speaker identification,  nonparametric,  Earth Mover's Distance, 

Full Text: PDF(1MB)

Summary: 
In this paper, we propose a distributed speaker recognition method using a nonparametric speaker model and Earth Mover's Distance (EMD). In distributed speaker recognition, the quantized feature vectors are sent to a server. The Gaussian mixture model (GMM), the traditional method used for speaker recognition, is trained using the maximum likelihood approach. However, it is difficult to fit continuous density functions to quantized data. To overcome this problem, the proposed method represents each speaker model with a speaker-dependent VQ code histogram designed by registered feature vectors and directly calculates the distance between the histograms of speaker models and testing quantized feature vectors. To measure the distance between each speaker model and testing data, we use EMD which can calculate the distance between histograms with different bins. We conducted text-independent speaker identification experiments using the proposed method. Compared to results using the traditional GMM, the proposed method yielded relative error reductions of 32% for quantized data.