Access control by means of automatic speaker verification

An access control system is described using speech samples for an automatic verification of a claimed identity. A hardware speech analysis processor extracts spectral information from the utterance and compares these features with a reference stored under the claimed identity using a suitable pattern recognition algorithm implemented on a minicomputer. This reference can be reduced in storage size per speaker such that magnetic identity cards can be used as memory to be carried around by the user. Thus the number of users is not limited by the system and no large memory is required in the minicomputer. The results of first experiments are reported.