The effect of room parameters on speaker verification using reverberant speech

The performance of speaker verification (SVR) systems degrades with the presence of room reverberation. Reverberation results in mismatched conditions between target models and test segments. Reverberation time (RT) is commonly used as a room parameter that represents reverberation. We investigate the effect of other room parameters such as room dimensions and reflection coefficients of the walls on SVR. Equal error rate (EER) is calculated by using room dimensions and reflection coefficients as parameters. Results of SVR with reverberant speech of the same RT are shown to be essentially different, when other room parameters are different. Feature normalization techniques are tested with reverberant speech of the same RT, and shown to be either improving or degrading the performance of SVR when other room parameters are different. This stands in contradiction to the approach in the literature towards RT as a dominant room parameter.