Reliability assessment and evaluation of objectively measured descriptors for perceptual speaker characterization

With the more widespread use of lower bit rate speech coders, the evaluation of speaker recognizability becomes a major issue to be addressed as well as the evaluation of overall voice quality. Furthermore, subjective quality evaluation of speech coders may produce different results depending on the voice character of the speakers used in the evaluation process. It follows naturally that methods and procedures to characterize speakers perceptually must be devised. We report on an enhanced set of objective descriptors of the speech waveform, assessing the reliability of their measurements as well as their merit in discriminating utterances from different speakers. Of the 45 measures presented, 35 have less than 10% RMS measurement error, and 25 of those have less than 5%.