An overview of the CAVE project research activities in speaker verification

This article presents an overview of the research activities carried out in the European CAVE project, which focused on text-dependent speaker verification on the telephone network using whole word Hidden Markov Models. It documents in detail various aspects of the technology and the methodology used within the project. In particular, it addresses the issue of model estimation in the context of limited enrollment data and the problem of a posteriori decision threshold setting. Experiments are carried out on the realistic telephone speech database SESP. State-of-the-art performance levels are obtained, which validates the technical approaches developed and assessed during the project as well as the working infrastructure which facilitated cooperation between the partners.