Automatic speaker recognition for use over communication channels

A system is described for the automatic comparison of speakers given short samples of their speech. The method does not depend on knowing what is being said, and is to a large extent independent of the degradations likely to be suffered by the speech during transmission. A small computer has been used to generate statistics on fundamental frequency and spectral shape information produced by a real-time cepstrum processor. Fundamental frequency is intrinsically resistant to most transmission degradations, and the spectral statistics taken are independent of linear spectral shaping. A useful level of recognition performance has been obtained using a total of 154 20s samples of read speech from thirteen typical speakers of British English.