Speaker verification based on wavelet packets

Abstract

Alternative ways to represent speaker's voice individuality are studied for the task of speaker verification. We exploit a set of orthonormal bases provided by wavelet packets that allow an effective manipulation of the frequency subbands according to the critical bands concept. Novel wavelet packet based sets of speech features are contrasted with existing wavelet features as well as with the widely accepted Mel-scale cepstral coefficients (MFCC). Our scheme differs from previous wavelet-based works, primarily in the wavelet-packet tree design that follows the concept of critical bandwidth, as well as in the particular wavelet basis function that have been used. Comparative experimental results confirm the assertion that the proposed speech features outperform MFCC, as well as previously used wavelet features, on the task of speaker verification. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.