Jitter and shimmer measurements for speaker recognition

Jitter and shimmer are measures of the cycle-to-cycle variations of fundamental frequency and amplitude, respectively, which have been largely used for the description of pathological voice quality. Since they characterise some aspects concerning particular voices, it is a priori expected to find differences in the values of jitter and shimmer among speakers. In this paper, several types of jitter and shimmer measurements have been analysed. Experiments performed with the Switchboard-I conversational speech database show that jitter and shimmer measurements give excellent results in speaker verification as complementary features of spectral and prosodic parameters.