Contrasting the effects of different frequency bands on speaker and accent identification

Abstract

This letter presents an experimental study investigating the effect of frequency sub-bands on regional accent identification (AID) and speaker identification (SID) performance on the ABI-1 corpus. The AID and SID systems are based on Gaussian mixture modeling. The SID experiments show up to 100% accuracy when using the full 11.025 kHz bandwidth. The best AID performance of 60.34% is obtained when using band-pass filtered (0.23–3.4 kHz) speech. The experiments using isolated narrow sub-bands show that the regions (0–0.77 kHz) and (3.40–11.02 kHz) are the most useful for SID, while those in the region (0.34–3.44 kHz) are best for AID. AID experiments are also performed with intersession variability compensation, which provides the biggest performance gain in the (2.23–5.25 kHz) region