Using jitter and shimmer in speaker verification

Jitter and shimmer are measures of the fundamental frequency and amplitude cycle-to-cycle variations, respectively. Both features have been largely used for the description of pathological voices, and since they characterise some aspects concerning particular voices, they are expected to have a certain degree of speaker specificity. In the current work, jitter and shimmer are successfully used in a speaker verification experiment. Moreover, both measures are combined with spectral and prosodic features using several types of normalisation and fusion techniques in order to obtain better verification results. The overall speaker verification system is also improved by using histogram equalisation as a normalisation technique previous to fusing the features by SVM.This work has been supported by the Spanish Government under Grant AP2003-3598. The authors would like to thank Pascual Ejarque and Andrey Temko for his help in the fusion techniques used in this work