A Gaussian Selection Method for Speaker Verification with Short Utterances

Speaker recognition systems frequently use GMM-MAP method for modeling speakers. This method represents the speaker using a Gaussian mixture. However, in this mixture not all Gaussian components are truly representative of the speaker. In order to remove the model redundancy, this work proposes a Gaussian selection method to achieve a new GMM model only with the more representative Gaussian components. The results of speaker verification experiments applying the proposal show a similar performance to the baseline; however, the speaker models used have a reduction of 80% compared to the speaker model used as the baseline. Our proposal was also applied to speaker recognition system with short test signals of 15, 5 and 3 seconds obtaining an improvement in EER of 0.43%, 2.64% and 1.60%, respectively, compared to the baseline. The application of this method in real or embedded speaker verification systems could be very useful for reducing computational and memory cost.