Efficient speaker identification using spectral entropy

In voice recognition, the two main problems are speech recognition (what was said), and speaker recognition (who was speaking). The usual method for speaker recognition is to postulate a model where the speaker identity corresponds to the parameters of the model, which estimation could be time-consuming when the number of candidate speakers is large. In this paper, we model the speaker as a high dimensional point cloud of entropy-based features, extracted from the speech signal. The method allows indexing, and hence it can manage large databases. We experimentally assessed the quality of the identification with a publicly available database formed by extracting audio from a collection of YouTube videos of 1,000 different speakers. With 20 second audio excerpts, we were able to identify a speaker with 97% accuracy when the recording environment is not controlled, and with 99% accuracy for controlled recording environments.