Speaker-Identifying Features Based on Formant Tracks.

摘要

The formant structure of three diphthongs, four tense vowels, and three retroflex sounds was examined in detail for possible speaker-identifying features. These sounds were spoken five times each in sentence context by ten speakers of General American on one day and by six of the speakers on a second day at least three weeks later. Formant tracks were computed for each sound under investigation using covariance-type pitch-asynchronous linear prediction togehter with a root-finding algorithm. The interspeaker variability of about 200 measurements made on these formant tracks was compared initially with intraspeaker variability through the calculation of F ratios. Those with average F ratios greater than 60 were evaluated further with a probability-of-error criterion. The individual differences apparent in the speaker identifying sounds presumably depend more on speaker habits than on vocal-tract anatomy. The error bound predicted for a speaker identification procedure based on these five features is 0.24%. An identification experiment using only the best two features gave 12 errors out of 80 identifications.