SPEAKER VERIFIER USING NEAREST-NEIGHBOR DISTANCE MEASURE

A speaker verification system which accepts or rejects the claimed identity of an individual based on analysis and measurements of the speaker's utterances. The utterances are elicited by prompting the individual seeking identification to read test phrases chosen at random by the verification system composed of words from a small vocabulary. Nearest-neighbor distances between speech frames derived from such spoken test phrases and speech frames of corresponding vocabulary "words" from previously stored utterances of the speaker seeking identification are computed along with distances between such spoken test phrases and corresponding vocabulary words for a set of reference speakers. The claim for identification is accepted or rejected based on the relationship among such distances and a predetermined threshold value.