Speaker specific feature based clustering and its applications in language independent forensic speaker recognition

Abstract

Forensic speaker recognition (FSR) is the process of determining whether the source of a questioned voice recording (trace) is a specific individual (suspected speaker). The role of the forensic expert is to testify by using, if possible, a quantitative measure of this value to the value of the voice evidence. Using this information as an aid in their judgments and decisions are up to the judge and/or the jury. Most existing methods measure inter-utterance similarities directly based on spectrum-based characteristics, the resulting clusters may not be well related to speaker’s, but rather to different acoustic classes. This research addresses this deficiency by projecting language-independent utterances into a reference space equipped to cover the standard voice features underlying the entire utterance set. The resulting projection vectors naturally represent the language-independent voice-like relationships among all the utterances and are therefore more robust against non-speaker interference. Then a clustering approach is proposed based on the peak approximation in order to maximize the similarities between language-independent utterances within all clusters. This method uses a K-medoid, Fuzzy C-means, Gustafson and Kessel and Gath-Geva algorithm to evaluate the cluster to which each utterance should be allocated, overcoming the disadvantage of traditional hierarchical clustering that the ultimate outcome can only hit the optimum recognition efficiency. The recognition efficiency of K-medoid, Fuzzy C-means, Gustafson and Kessel and Gath-Geva clustering algorithms are 95.2%, 97.3%, 98.5% and 99.7% and EER are 3.62%, 2.91 %, 2.82%, and 2.61% respectively. The EER improvement of the Gath-Geva technique based FSRsystem compared with Gustafson and Kessel and Fuzzy C-means is 8.04% and 11.49% respectively