Müller C. (ed.) Speaker Classification I. Fundamentals, Features, and Methods

Springer, 2007. — 362 p.The best way to introduce this textbook is by using the words Volker Dellwo and his colleagues had chosen to begin their chapter How Is Individuality Expressed in Voice? While they use this statement to motivate the introductory chapter on speech production and the phonetic description of speech, it constitutes a framework of the entire book as well:What characteristics of the speaker become manifest in his or her voice and speaking behavior? Which of them can be inferred from analyzing the acoustic realizations? What can this information be used for? Which methods are the most suitable for diversified problems in this area of research? How should the quality of the results be evaluated?
Within the scope of this book the term speaker classification is defined as assigning a given speech sample to a particular class of speakers. These classes could be Women vs. Men, Children vs. Adults, Natives vs. Foreigners, etc. Speaker recognition is considered as being a sub-field of speaker classification in which the respective class has only one member (Speaker vs. Non-Speaker). Since in the engineering community this sub-field is explored in more depth than others covered by the book, many of the articles focus on speaker recognition. Nevertheless, the findings are discussed in the context of the broader notion of speaker classification where feasible.
The book is organized in two volumes. Volume I encompasses more general and overview-like articles which contribute to answering a subset of the questions above: Besides Dellwo and coworkers’ introductory chapter, the Fundamentals part also includes a survey by David Hill, who addresses past and present speaker classification issues and outlines a potential future progression of the field. Volume II compiles a number of selected self-contained papers on research projects in the field of speaker classification.Fundamentals
How Is Individuality Expressed in Voice? An Introduction to Speech Production and Description for Speaker Classification
Speaker Classification Concepts: Past, Present and Future
Part II Characteristics
Speaker Characteristics
Foreign Accent
Acoustic Analysis of Adult Speaker Age
Speech Under Stress: Analysis, Modeling and Recognition
Speaker Characteristics and Emotion Classification
Emotions in Speech: Juristic Implications
Applications
Application of Speaker Classification in Human Machine Dialog Systems
Speaker Classification in Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics
Forensic Automatic Speaker Classification in the Coming Paradigm Shift
The Many Roles of Speaker Classification in Speaker Verification and Identification
Methods and Features
Frame Based Features
Higher-Level Features in Speaker Recognition
Enhancing Speaker Discrimination at the Feature Level
Classification Methods for Speaker Recognition
Multi-stream Fusion for Speaker Classification
Evaluation
Evaluations of Automatic Speaker Classification Systems
An Introduction to Application-Independent Evaluation of Speaker Recognition Systems