Speaker verification system based on articulatory information from ultrasound recordings

Current state-of-the-art speaker verification (SV) systems are known to be strongly affected by unexpected variability presented during testing, such as environmental noise or changes in vocal effort. In this work, we analyze and evaluate articulatory information of the tongue's movement as a means to improve the performance of speaker verification systems. We use a Spanish database, where besides the speech signals, we also include articulatory information that was acquired with an ultrasound system. Two groups of features are proposed to represent the articulatory information, and the obtained performance is compared to an SV system trained only with acoustic information. Our results show that the proposed features contain highly discriminative information, and they are related to speaker identity; furthermore, these features can be used to complement and improve existing systems by combining such information with cepstral coefficients at the feature level.