Text-independent speaker verification using ant colony optimization-based selected features

With the growing trend toward remote security verification procedures for telephone banking, biometric security measures and similar applications, automatic speaker verification (ASV) has received a lot of attention in recent years. The complexity of ASV system and its verification time depends on the number of feature vectors, their dimensionality, the complexity of the speaker models and the number of speakers. In this paper, we concentrate on optimizing dimensionality of feature space by selecting relevant features. At present there are several methods for feature selection in ASV systems. To improve performance of ASV system we present another method that is based on ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm. After feature reduction phase, feature vectors are applied to a Gaussian mixture model universal background model (GMM-UBM) which is a text-independent speaker verification model. The performance of proposed algorithm is compared to the performance of genetic algorithm on the task of feature selection in TIMIT corpora. The results of experiments indicate that with the optimized feature set, the performance of the ASV system is improved. Moreover, the speed of verification is significantly increased since by use of ACO, number of features is reduced over 80% which consequently decrease the complexity of our ASV system. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.