A robust speaker identification system using the responses from a model of the auditory periphery

Speaker identification under noisy conditions is one of the challenging topics in the field of speech processing applications. Motivated by the fact that the neural responses are robust against noise, this paper proposes a new speaker identification system using 2-D neurograms constructed from the responses of a physiologically-based computational model of the auditory periphery. The responses of auditory-nerve fibers for a wide range of characteristic frequency were simulated to speech signals to construct neurograms. The neurogram coefficients were trained using the well-known Gaussian mixture model-universal background model classification technique to generate an identity model for each speaker. In this study, three text-independent and one text-dependent speaker databases were employed to test the identification performance of the proposed method. Also, the robustness of the proposed method was investigated using speech signals distorted by three types of noise such as the white Gaussian, pink, and street noises with different signal-to-noise ratios. The identification results of the proposed neural-response-based method were compared to the performances of the traditional speaker identification methods using features such as the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, Gamma-tone frequency cepstral coefficients and frequency domain linear prediction. Although the classification accuracy achieved by the proposed method was comparable to the performance of those traditional techniques in quiet, the new feature was found to provide lower error rates of classification under noisy environments.