Speaker identification of whispering speech: an investigation on selected timbrel features and KNN distance measures

Speaker identification from the whispered speech is of great importance in the field of forensic science as well as in many other applications. Whispered speech shows many changes in the characteristics to its neutral counterpart. Hence the task of identification becomes difficult. This paper presents the use of only well-performing timbrel features selected by Hybrid selection method and effect of distance measures used in KNN classifier on the identification accuracy. The results using timbrel features are compared with MFCC features; the accuracy with the former is observed higher. KNN classifier with most probable distance function suitable for a whispered database like Euclidean and City-block are also compared. The combination of timbrel features and KNN classifiers with city block distance function have reported the highest identification accuracy.