Improved MFCC-based feature for robust speaker identification

Abstract The Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) is the most widely used feature in speech and speaker recognition. However, MFCC is very sensitive to noise interference, which tends to drastically degrade the performance of recognition systems because of the mismatches between training and testing. In this paper, the logarithmic transformation in the standard MFCC analysis is replaced by a combined function to improve the noisy sensitivity. The proposed feature extraction process is also combined with speech enhancement methods, such as spectral subtraction and median-filter to further suppress the noise. Experiments show that the proposed robust MFCC-based feature significantly reduces the recognition error rate over a wide signal-to-noise ratio range.