Abstract:
Speaker recognition is the technique of recognizing automatically, who is speaking on the source of
individual information built-in in speech waves. It uses the speaker's voice to confirm their identity
and provides control access for services such as voice calls, database access facilities, information
services, voice mail, and security control for private information areas, and remote access to
computers, and for other several fields.
Research within the area of speaker recognition has now crossed over five decades and has shown
positive results under controlled conditions and having big data sets.
Besides, almost all of the previous study uses traditional methods like MFCC and LPCC as feature
extraction and GMM, VQ and HMM, etc. as classifiers. These features generally require the domain
knowledge for researchers to be designed and take a long time to be tested and selected for high
classification performance.
And also concerning the requirement of realistic applications, the system should take into account the
problems related to memory and computational resource limitation.
So, in this thesis, we tried to address the short utterance data sets in the real circumstance by applying
an end-to-end Convolutional Neural Network and CNN with SVM. Since CNN training usually
requires large sample data and has the overfitting problem. On the other hand, SVM has good
generalization ability and can solve the small sample problem.
For the preparation of the data, audio signals are gathered from the Bahir Dar city by directly
recording sounds from Amharic language speakers using an audio recorder. A total of 50 datasets
were collected having 10 samples in each speaker. Each speaker had 10 seconds of waiting time to
speak over the recorder, after being collected and pre-processed; each pre-processed voice was
transformed into a spectrogram image.
Then, the spectrogram images were used as an input to the proposed model to learn speaker-specific
spectral features.
To see the effect of gender on speaker identification for the Amharic language, we have experimented
with 25 male and 25 female speakers. Then, we have found an accuracy of 76 % and 92 % for males
and females respectively.
Finally, we compared the end-to-end and combination of CNN with SVM using a 50 speakers' voice
dataset. Then we have achieved an accuracy of 82%, and 95%, for an end-to-end Convolutional
Neural Network, and convolutional neural network with a support vector machine model respectively.