Comparison between normalizations for SVM — GMM supervectors speaker verification

This paper presents a comparison between several features normalization methods, and a comparison between different types of Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) based supervectors normalizations for robust Speaker Verification. We implemented the methods of normalizations as a part of speaker verification system using Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier and GMM-based supervectors. When implementing the speaker recognition system, we used Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) feature extraction. A valid question is which features normalization to use, if any. We examine the most common methods of feature normalizations, such as: Feature Warping mapping, and Cepstral Mean Subtraction (CMS) normalization with and without variance normalization. These methods were compared to features without normalization at all, and to a basic [-1, 1] normalization. In addition, we applied few types of normalizations to the GMM-mean supervectors, in order to improve the performance of the SVM classifier. All comparisons of the speaker verification system had been done in terms of DET curve, EER (Equal Error Rate) and Min. DCF. The best results we achieved were on combined supervector normalizations of Universal Background Model (UBM) Standard Deviation (STD) and [-1, 1] normalization. The type of the MFCC normalization has no big influence on the verification performance. The best results were: EER about 5.0% and MIN. DCF of 0.02.