Speaker identification for security systems using reinforcement-trained pRAM neural network architectures

Speaker identification may be employed as part of a security system requiring user authentication. In this case, the claimed identity of the user is known from a magnetic card and PIN number, for example, and an utterance is requested to confirm the identity of the user. A fast response is necessary in the confirmation phase and a fast registration process for new users is desirable. The time encoded signal processing and recognition (TESPAR) digital language is used to preprocess the speech signal. A speaker cannot be identified directly from the single TESPAR vector since there is a highly nonlinear relationship between the vector's components such that vectors are not linearly separable. Therefore the vector and its characteristics suggest that classification using a neural network will provide an effective solution. Good classification performance has been achieved using a probabilistic RAM (pRAM) neuron. Four probabilistic pRAM neural network architectures are presented. A performance of approximately 97% correct classifications has been obtained, which is similar to results obtained elsewhere (M. Sharma and R.J. Mammone, 1996), and slightly better than a MLP network. No speech recognition stage was used in obtaining these results, so the performance relates only to identifying a speaker's voice and is therefore independent of the spoken phrase. This has been achieved in a hardware-realizable system which may be incorporated into a smart-card or similar application.