Motivated by the success of i-vectors in the field of speaker recognition, this paper proposes a new approach for age estimation from telephone speech patterns based on i-vectors. In this method, each utterance is modeled by its corresponding ivector. Then, Support Vector Regression (SVR) is applied to estimate the age of speakers. The proposed method is trained and tested on telephone conversations of the National Institute for Standard in Technology (NIST) 2010 and 2008 Speaker Recognition Evaluations databases. Evaluation results show that the proposed method outperforms different conventional methods in speaker age estimation.

Index Terms: speaker age estimation, i-vector, support vector regression