Exploring the discriminatory potential of F0 distribution parameters in traditional forensic speaker recognition

Yuko Kinoshita*, Shunichi Ishihara, Philip Rose

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    29 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Despite its many prima facie attractive properties for forensic speaker recognition, F0 is regarded as having limited forensic value due to its large within-speaker variability. However, its forensic use to date has been limited mostly to its long-term mean and standard deviation. This paper examines the discriminatory potential, within a Likeli-hood Ratio-based approach, of additional parametric features from the distribution of long-term Fo: its skew, kurtosis, modal F0 and modal density. Motivated by the observation that the shape of the long-term F0 distribution shows less within-speaker occasion-to-occasion difference, we report a forensic discrimination experiment with non-contemporaneous speech samples from 201 male Japanese speakers. Using a multivariate Likelihood Ratio as discriminant distance with the six LTF0 distribution parameters, an equal error rate of 10.7% is obtained from 201 target and 80400 non-target trials. We also investigate how the EER degrades as a function of amount of voiced speech.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)91-111
    Number of pages21
    JournalInternational Journal of Speech, Language and the Law
    Volume16
    Issue number1
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2009

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