Adaptive wavelet shrinkage for noise robust speaker recognition

Abstract Speaker recognition faces many practical difficulties, among which signal inconsistency due to environmental and acquisition channel factors is most challenging. The noise imposed to the voice signal varies greatly and a priori noise model is usually unavailable. In this article, we propose a robust speaker recognition method that employs a novel adaptive wavelet shrinkage method for noise suppression. In our method, wavelet subband coefficient thresholds are automatically computed, which are proportional to the noise contamination. In the application of wavelet shrinkage for noise removal, a dual-threshold strategy is developed to suppress noise, preserve signal coefficients and minimize the introduction of artifacts. The recognition is achieved using modification of Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient of overlapped voice signal segments. The efficacy of our method is evaluated with voice signals from two public available speech signal databases and is compared with state-of-the-art methods. It is demonstrated that our proposed method exhibits great robustness in various noise conditions. The improvement is significant especially when noise dominates the underlying speech.