A Speaker Pruning Method for Real-Time Speaker Identification System

It has been known that GMM (Gaussian Mixture Model) based speaker identification systems using ML (Maximum Likelihood) and WMR (Weighting Model Rank) demonstrate very high performances. However, such systems are not so effective under practical environments, in terms of real time processing, because of their high calculation costs. In this paper, we propose a new speaker-pruning algorithm that effectively reduces the calculation cost. In this algorithm, we select 20% of speaker models having higher likelihood with a part of input speech and apply MWMR (Modified Weighted Model Rank) to these selected speaker models to find out identified speaker. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, we performed speaker identification experiments using TIMIT database. The proposed method shows more than 60% improvement of reduced processing time than the conventional GMM based system with no pruning, while maintaining the recognition accuracy.