Cepstral analysis of ‘‘cold‐speech’’ for speaker recognition: A second look

Speech affected by colds continues to be an issue in speaker recognition technology. This study is a continuation of the ‘‘cold‐affected’’ speech project [R. G. Tull and J. C. Rutledge, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 99, 2549(A) (1996)] which compared ‘‘cold‐speech’’ and normal/healthy speech of a male subject to analyze differences in vowel durations and mel‐cepstral coefficients. This new study analyzes the speech of two additional male subjects during a cold and after a cold to test speaker intrasession (‘‘cold‐speech’’ within the same recording session, normal speech within the same session), and speaker intersession (‘‘cold‐speech’’ versus normal speech on different days). The sentence being used for recording is the recitation of numbers: ‘‘1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10.’’ The lower‐order mel‐cepstral coefficients are chosen as parameters (independent variable) in this study. The research for this study shows that there are patterns in the coefficients (c2 and c3) of ‘‘cold‐speech’’ that are different from the patterns...