ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1997
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1997

Speaker verification with limited enrollment data

Owen Kimball, Michael Schmidt, Herbert Gish, Jason Waterman

New methods for speaker verification that address the problems of limited training data and unknown telephone channel are presented. We describe a system for studying the feasibility of telephone based voice signatures for electronic documents that uses speaker verification with a fixed test phrase but very limited data for training speaker models. We examine three methods for speaker verification that address these characteristics in different ways, including text- independent mixture models, a broad phonetic category model that has some of the properties of both text-dependent and text-independent approaches, and a text-dependent approach based on speaker adaptation. The speaker-adaptive approach is shown to have significantly better performance when the training and test channel conditions are mismatched, resulting in better overall performance across all conditions.