INTERSPEECH 2009 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Brighton, United Kingdom September 6-10, 2009

Age Verification Using a Hybrid Speech Processing Approach

Ron M. Hecht (1), Omer Hezroni (1), Amit Manna (1), Ruth Aloni-Lavi (1), Gil Dobry (1), Amir Alfandary (1), Yaniv Zigel (2)

(1) PuddingMedia, Israel
(2) Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

The human speech production system is a multi-level system. On the upper level, it starts with information that one wants to transmit. It ends on the lower level with the materialization of the information into a speech signal. Most of the recent work conducted in age estimation is focused on the lower-acoustic level. In this research the upper lexical level information is utilized for age-group verification and it is shown that one’s vocabulary reflects one’s age. Several age-group verification systems that are based on automatic transcripts are proposed. In addition, a hybrid approach is introduced, an approach that combines the word-based system and an acoustic-based system. Experiments were conducted on a four age-groups verification task using the Fisher corpora, where an average equal error rate (EER) of 28.7% was achieved using the lexical-based approach and 28.0% using an acoustic approach. By merging these two approaches the verification error was reduced to 24.1%.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Hecht, Ron M. / Hezroni, Omer / Manna, Amit / Aloni-Lavi, Ruth / Dobry, Gil / Alfandary, Amir / Zigel, Yaniv (2009): "Age verification using a hybrid speech processing approach", In INTERSPEECH-2009, 184-187.