THE REASSIGNED SPECTROGRAM AS A TOOL FOR VOICE IDENTIFICATION

Sean A. Fulop1 & Sandra Ferrari Disner2
1California State University Fresno; 2no affiliation

ID 1649
[full paper]

A precise imaging scheme, the reassigned (or time-corrected instantaneous frequency) spectrogram, holds out considerable promise for identifying the speaker of an utterance. Unlike conventional spectrograms, reassigned spectrograms can display a few tens of milliseconds of phonation in great detail, without blurring in the time or frequency domains, and they are also impervious to many forms of noise or channel contamination. They are thus able to reveal some unique time-frequency features of an individual's phonatory process. While further testing is needed to establish evaluation criteria and confidence estimates, it is encouraging to see how readily pairs of reassigned spectrograms can be matched in the set illustrated herein. At the very least, such images can augment the techniques that are currently in use for speaker identification and verification.