Pattern-Matching Procedure for Automatic Talker Recognition

A pattern-matching procedure for automatic recognition of talkers was used to study the effects of variations in patterns upon recognition performance. Several utterances of common words, excerpted from context, were spoken by ten talkers and converted to time-frequency-energy patterns. Some of each talker's utterances were used to form reference patterns and the remaining utterances served as test patterns. The recognition procedure consisted of cross-correlating the test patterns with the reference patterns and selecting the talker corresponding to the reference pattern with the highest correlation as the talker of the test utterance. The same recognition procedure was used with patterns reduced to two dimensions. The recognition score for three-dimensional patterns was 89%. Reducing the original patterns to time-energy patterns resulted in a lower recognition score; however, when only spectral information was retained, recognition results were the same as those for three-dimensional patterns. No errors were made in recognition based on a small sample of patterns consisting of pooled spectra of several different voiced sounds.