On the use of different speech representations for speaker modeling

Numerous speech representations have been reported to be useful in speaker recognition. However, there is much less agreement on which speech representation provides a perfect representation of speaker-specific information conveyed in a speech signal. Unlike previous work, we propose an alternative approach to speaker modeling by the simultaneous use of different speech representations in an optimal way. Inspired by our previous empirical studies, we present a soft competition scheme on different speech representations to exploit different speech representations in encoding speaker-specific information. On the basis of this soft competition scheme, we present a parametric statistical model, generalized Gaussian mixture model (GGMM), to characterize a speaker identity based on different speech representations. Moreover, we develop an expectation-maximization algorithm for parameter estimation in the GGMM. The proposed speaker modeling approach has been applied to text-independent speaker recognition and comparative results on the KING speech corpus demonstrate its effectiveness. © 2005 IEEE.