Speaker Recognition System Using Hybrid of MFCC and RCNN with HCO Algorithm Optimization

Abstract

Though there are advancements in speaker recognition technology, available systems often fail to correctly recognize speakers especially in noisy environments. The use of Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) has been improved using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) yet difficulties in achieving high accuracies still exists. Hybrid algorithms combining MFCC and Region-based Convolutional Neural Networks (RCNN) have been found to be promising. In this research features from speech signals were extracted for speaker recognition, to denoise the signals, design and develop a DFT-based denoising system using spectrum subtraction and to develop a speaker recognition method for the Verbatim Transcription using MFCC. The DFT was used to transform the sampled audio signal waveform into a frequency-domain signal. RCNN was used to model the characteristics of speakers based on their voice samples, and to classify them into different categories or identities. The novelty of the research was that it used MFCC integrated with RCNN and optimized with Host-Cuckoo Optimization (HCO) algorithm. HCO algorithm is capable of further weight optimization through the process of generating fit cuckoos for best weights. It also captured the temporal dependencies and long-term information. The system was tested and validated on audio recordings from different personalities from the National Assembly of Kenya. The results were compared with the actual identity of the speakers to confirm accuracy. The performance of the proposed approach was compared with two other existing speaker recognition the traditional approaches being MFCC-CNN and Linear Predictive Coefficients (LPC)-CNN. The comparison was based the Equal Error Rate (EER), False Rejection Rate (FRR), False Match Rate (FMR), and True Match Rate (TMR). Results show that the proposed algorithm outperformed the others in maintaining a lowest EER, FMR, FRR and highest TMR.