Evaluation of a noise-robust multi-stream speaker verification method using F0 information

We have previously proposed a noise-robust speaker verification method using fundamental frequency (F-0) extracted using the Hough transform. The method also incorporates an automatic stream-weight and decision threshold estimation technique. It has been confirmed that the proposed method is effective for white noise at various SNR conditions. This paper evaluates the proposed method in more practical in-car and elevator-hall noise conditions. The paper first describes the noise-robust F-0 extraction method and details of our robust speaker verification method using multi-stream HMMs for integrating the extracted F-0 and cepstral features. Details of the automatic stream-weight and threshold estimation method for multi-stream speaker verification framework are also explained. This method simultaneously optimizes stream-weights and a decision threshold by combining the linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and the Adaboost technique. Experiments were conducted using Japanese connected digit speech contaminated by white, in-car, or elevator-hall noise at various SNRs. Experimental results show that the F-0 features improve the verification performance in various noisy environments, and that our stream-weight and threshold optimization method effectively estimates control parameters so that FARs and FRRs are adjusted to achieve equal error rates (EERs) under various noisy conditions.