Voice-signature-based Speaker Recognition

• Main Author: Al-Kilani, Menia
• Other Authors: Venter, Isabella M.
• Language: en
• Published: University of the Western Cape 2018
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11394/5888

Magister Scientiae - MSc (Computer Science) === Personal identification and the protection of data are important issues because of the ubiquitousness of computing and these have thus become interesting areas of research in the field of computer science. Previously people have used a variety of ways to identify an individual and protect themselves, their property and their information. This they did mostly by means of locks, passwords, smartcards and biometrics. Verifying individuals by using their physical or behavioural features is more secure than using other data such as passwords or smartcards, because everyone has unique features which distinguish him or her from others. Furthermore the biometrics of a person are difficult to imitate or steal. Biometric technologies represent a significant component of a comprehensive digital identity solution and play an important role in security. The technologies that support identification and authentication of individuals is based on either their physiological or their behavioural characteristics. Live-­‐data, in this instance the human voice, is the topic of this research. The aim is to recognize a person’s voice and to identify the user by verifying that his/her voice is the same as a record of his / her voice-­‐signature in a systems database. To address the main research question: “What is the best way to identify a person by his / her voice signature?”, design science research, was employed. This methodology is used to develop an artefact for solving a problem. Initially a pilot study was conducted using visual representation of voice signatures, to check if it is possible to identify speakers without using feature extraction or matching methods. Subsequently, experiments were conducted with 6300 data sets derived from Texas Instruments and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology audio database. Two methods of feature extraction and classification were considered—mel frequency cepstrum coefficient and linear prediction cepstral coefficient feature extraction—and for classification, the Support Vector Machines method was used. The three methods were compared in terms of their effectiveness and it was found that the system using the mel frequency cepstrum coefficient, for feature extraction, gave the marginally better results for speaker recognition.