Advancements in Speaker Recognition: Exploring Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) for Enhanced Performance in Speaker Recognition

Abstract

Speaker recognition, a fundamental capability of software or hardware systems, involves receiving speech signals, identifying the speaker present in the speech signal, and subsequently recognizing the speaker for future interactions. This process emulates the cognitive task performed by the human brain. At its core, speaker recognition begins with speech as the input to the system. Various techniques have been developed for speech recognition, including Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), Linear Prediction Coefficients (LPC), Linear Prediction Cepstral coefficients (LPCC), Line Spectral Frequencies (LSF), Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), and Perceptual Linear Prediction (PLP). Although LPC and several other techniques have been explored, they are often deemed impractical for real-time applications. In contrast, MFCC stands out as one of the most prominent and widely used techniques for speaker recognition. The utilization of cepstrum allows for the computation of resemblance between two cepstral feature vectors, making it an effective tool in this domain. In comparison to LPC-derived cepstrum features, the use of MFCC features has demonstrated superior performance in metrics such as False Acceptance Rate (FAR) and False Rejection Rate (FRR) for speaker recognition systems. MFCCs leverage the human ear's critical bandwidth fluctuations with respect to frequency. To capture phonetically important characteristics of speech signals, filters are linearly separated at low frequencies and logarithmically separated at high frequencies. This design choice is central to the effectiveness of the MFCC technique. The primary objective of the proposed work is to devise efficient techniques that extract pertinent information related to the speaker, thereby enhancing the overall performance of the speaker recognition system. By optimizing feature extraction methods, this research aims to contribute to the advancement of speaker recognition technology.