Feature classification criterion for missing features mask estimation in robust speaker recognition

Currently, many speaker recognition applications must handle speech corrupted by environmental additive noise without having a priori knowledge about the characteristics of noise. Some previous works in speaker recognition have used the missing feature (MF) approach to compensate for noise. In most of those applications, the spectral reliability decision step is performed using the signal to noise ratio (SNR) criterion, which attempts to directly measure the relative signal to noise energy at each frequency. An alternative approach to spectral data reliability has been used with some success in the MF approach to speech recognition. Here, we compare the use of this new criterion with the SNR criterion for MF mask estimation in speaker recognition. The new reliability decision is based on the extraction and analysis of several spectro-temporal features from across the entire speech frame, but not across the time, which highlight the differences between spectral regions dominated by speech and by noise. We call it the feature classification (FC) criterion. It uses several spectral features to establish spectrogram reliability unlike SNR criterion that relies only in one feature: SNR. We evaluated our proposal through speaker verification experiments, in Ahumada speech database corrupted by different types of noise at various SNR levels. Experiments demonstrated that the FC criterion achieves considerably better recognition accuracy than the SNR criterion in the speaker verification tasks tested.