Speaker Verification

A speaker verification method is proposed that first builds a general model of user utterances using a set of general training speech data. The user also trains the system by providing a training utterance, such as a passphrase or other spoken utterance. Then in a test phase, the user provides a test utterance which includes some background noise as well as a test voice sample. The background noise is used to bring the condition of the training data closer to that of the test voice sample by modifying the training data and a reduced set of the general data, before creating adapted training and general models. Match scores are generated based on the comparison between the adapted models and the test voice sample, with a final match score calculated based on the difference between the match scores. This final match score gives a measure of the degree of matching between the test voice sample and the training utterance and is based on the degree of matching between the speech characteristics from extracted feature vectors that make up the respective speech signals, and is not a direct comparison of the raw signals themselves. Thus, the method can be used to verify a speaker without necessarily requiring the speaker to provide an identical test phrase to the phrase provided in the training sample.