A Comparative Study of Gender and Age Classification in Speech Signals

Accurate gender classification is useful in speech and speaker recognition as well as speech emotion classification, because a better performance has been reported when separate acoustic models are employed for males and females. Gender classification is also apparent in face recognition, video summarization, human-robot interaction, etc. Although gender classification is rather mature in applications dealing with images, it is still in its infancy in speech processing. Age classification, on the other hand, is also concerned as a useful tool in different applications, like issuing different permission levels for different aging groups. This paper concentrates on a comparative study of gender and age classification algorithms applied to speech signal. Experimental results are reported for the Danish Emotional Speech database (DES) and English Language Speech Database for Speaker Recognition (ELSDSR). The Bayes classifier using sequential floating forward selection (SFFS) for feature selection, probabilistic Neural Networks (PNNs), support vector machines (SVMs), the K nearest neighbor (K-NN) and Gaussian mixture model (GMM), as different classifiers, are empirically compared in order to determine the best classifier for gender and age classification when speech signal is processed. It is proven that gender classification can be performed with an accuracy of 95% approximately using speech signal either from both genders or male and female separately. The accuracy for age classification is about 88%.