The browser you are using is not supported by this website. All versions of Internet Explorer are no longer supported, either by us or Microsoft (read more here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/windows/end-of-ie-support).

Please use a modern browser to fully experience our website, such as the newest versions of Edge, Chrome, Firefox or Safari etc.

Low-Variance Multitaper MFCC Features: A Case Study in Robust Speaker Verification

På svenska

Author

  • Tomi Kinnunen
  • Rahim Saeidi
  • Filip Sedlak
  • Kong Aik Lee
  • Johan Sandberg
  • Maria Sandsten
  • Haizhou Li

Summary, in English

In speech and audio applications, short-term signal spectrum is often represented using mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) computed from a windowed discrete Fourier transform (DFT). Windowing reduces spectral leakage but variance of the spectrum estimate remains high. An elegant extension to windowed DFT is the so-called multitaper method which uses multiple time-domain windows (tapers) with frequency-domain averaging. Multitapers have received little attention in speech processing even though they produce low-variance features. In this paper, we propose the multitaper method for MFCC extraction with a practical focus. We provide, first, detailed statistical analysis of MFCC bias and variance using autoregressive process simulations on the TIMIT corpus. For speaker verification experiments on the NIST 2002 and 2008 SRE corpora, we consider three Gaussian mixture model based classifiers with universal background model (GMM-UBM), support vector machine (GMM-SVM) and joint factor analysis (GMM-JFA). Multitapers improve MinDCF over the baseline windowed DFT by relative 20.4% (GMM-SVM) and 13.7% (GMM-JFA) on the interview-interview condition in NIST 2008. The GMM-JFA system further reduces MinDCF by 18.7% on the telephone data. With these improvements and generally noncritical parameter selection, multitaper MFCCs are a viable candidate for replacing the conventional MFCCs.

Department/s

Publishing year

2012

Language

English

Pages

1990-2001

Publication/Series

IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing

Volume

20

Issue

7

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

IEEE - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.

Topic

  • Probability Theory and Statistics

Keywords

  • Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC)
  • multitaper
  • small-variance
  • estimation
  • speaker verification

Status

Published

Research group

  • Statistical Signal Processing Group

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1558-7924