Publication
Combining Regression and Classification Methods for Improving Automatic Speaker Age Recognition
Charl van Heerden; Etienne Barnard; Marelie Davel; Christiaan van der Walt; Ewald van Dyk; Michael Feld; Christian Müller
In: Proceedings of the the 35th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP-2010), March 14-19, Dallas, TX, USA, IEEE Computer Society, 3/2010.
Abstract
We present a novel approach to automatic speaker age
classification, which combines regression and classification
to achieve competitive classification accuracy on telephone
speech. Support vector machine regression is used to generate
finer age estimates, which are combined with the posterior
probabilities of well-trained discriminative gender classifiers
to predict both the age and gender of a speaker. We show
that this combination performs better than direct 7-class classifiers.
The regressors and classifiers are trained using longterm
features such as pitch and formants, as well as shortterm
(frame-based) features derived from MAP adaptation of
GMMs that were trained on MFCCs.