Reducing speaker model search space in speaker identification

For large population speaker identification (SID) systems, likelihood computations between an unknown speaker's test feature set and speaker models can be very time-consuming and detrimental to applications where fast SID is required. In this paper, we propose a method whereby speaker models are clustered during the training stage. Then during the testing stage, only those clusters which are likely to contain high-likelihood speaker models are searched. The proposed method reduces the speaker model space which directly results in faster SID. Although there maybe a slight loss in identification accuracy depending on the number of clusters searched, this loss can be controlled by trading off speed and accuracy.