M. Sigmund and T. Dostal (Czech Republic)
Speech processing, gender recognition, mel-cepstral coefficients
Gender differences in language are often studied by rating of verbal behavior. This paper presents and discusses an approach to automatic gender distinction in a short segment of normally spoken continuous speech. In order to see which phonemes are effective for gender recognition, we analyzed individual all Czech vowels. Two different simple identifiers based on selected mel frequency cepstral coefficients were evaluated. Using vowel phonemes, we achieved in short-time analysis (20 msec) a gender identification accuracy of more than 90%. Especially for vowel "a" almost no error occurs. For text independent analysis, the speech duration of 500 msec was sufficient to identify male/female speakers with the accuracy of more than 93%. The described algorithms were evaluated and tested on Czech speech. Automatic estimation of speaker's gender by her/his voice is an important factor to realize high-quality dialogue systems.
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