Speaker Identification by Joint Statistical Characterization in the Log Gabor Wavelet Domain

Real world Speaker Identification (SI) application differs from ideal or laboratory conditions causing perturbations that leads to a mismatch between the training and testing environment and degrade the performance drastically. Many strategies have been adopted to cope with acoustical degradation; wavelet based Bayesian marginal model is one of them. But Bayesian marginal models cannot model the inter-scale statistical dependencies of different wavelet scales. Simple nonlinear estimators for wavelet based denoising assume that the wavelet coefficients in different scales are independent in nature. However wavelet coefficients have significant inter-scale dependency. This paper enhances this inter-scale dependency property by a Circularly Symmetric Probability Density Function (CS-PDF) related to the family of Spherically Invariant Random Processes (SIRPs) in Log Gabor Wavelet (LGW) domain and corresponding joint shrinkage estimator is derived by Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) estimator. A framework is proposed based on these to denoise speech signal for automatic speaker identification problems. The robustness of the proposed framework is tested for Text Independent Speaker Identification application on 100 speakers of POLYCOST and 100 speakers of YOHO speech database in three different noise environments. Experimental results show that the proposed estimator yields a higher improvement in identification accuracy compared to other estimators on popular Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) based speaker model and Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) features.