Investigations into prosodic syllable contour features for speaker recognition

We investigate various ways of generating prosodic syllable contour features that have recently been applied to enhance systems for speaker recognition. We compare different approaches for segmentation of speech into syllable-like units, techniques for contour modeling and the extraction of pitch and energy, taking into account the computational complexity and gender dependence. We show that the performance is especially affected by the segmentation and the quality of the pitch tracking algorithm and that the features are highly gender dependent. Still, computationally simple ways of segmentation of speech can be used to achieve good results, as experiments on 2006 NIST speaker recognition evaluation task indicate.