Speaker Identification And Verification Over Telephone Network example essay topic

SPEAKER IDENTIFICATION AND VERIFICATION OVER SHORT DISTANCE TELEPHONE LINES USING ARTIFICIAL NEURALNETWORKSGanesh K Venayagamoorthy, Nar end Sunderpersadh, and Theophilus N Engineering Department, M L Sultan Technik on, P O Box 1334, Durban, South Africa. ABSTRACT Crime and corruption have become rampant today in our society and countless money is lost each year due to white collar crime, fraud, and embezzlement. This paper presents a technique of an ongoing work to combat white-collar crime in telephone transactions by identifying and verifying speakers using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Results are presented to show the potential of this technique.

1. INTRODUCTION Several countries today are facing rampant crime and corruption. Countless money is lost each year due to white collar crime, fraud, and embezzlement. In today's complex economic times, businesses and individuals are both falling victims to these devastating crimes. Employees embezzle funds or steal goods from their employers, then disappear or hide behind legal issues. Individuals can easily become helpless victims of identity theft, stock schemes and other scams that rob them of their money White collar crime occurs in the gray area where the criminal law ends and civil law begins.

Victims of white collar crimes are faced with navigating a daunting legal maze in order to effect some sort of resolution or recovery. Law enforcement is often too focused on combating "street crime" or does not have the expertise to investigate and prosecute sophisticated fraudulent acts. Even if criminal prosecution is pursued, a criminal conviction does not mean that the victims of fraud are able to recover their losses. They have to rely on th criminal courts awarding restitution after the conviction and by then the perpetrator has disposed of or of the assets available for recovery. From the civil law perspective, resolution and recovery can just be a difficult as pursuing criminal prosecution. Perpetrators of white collar crime are often difficult to locate and served with civil process.

Once the perpetrators have been located and served, proof must be provided that the fraudulent act occurred and recovery / damages are needed. This usually takes a lengthy legal fight, which often can cost the victim more money than the fraud itself. If a judgement is awarded, then the task of collecting is made difficult by the span of time passed and the perpetrator's efforts to hide the assets. Often after a long legal battle, the victims are left with a worthless judgement and no recovery. One solution to avoid white collar crimes and shorten the lengthy time in locating and serving perpetrators with a judgement is by the use of biometrics techniques for identifying and verifying individuals. Biometrics are methods for recognizing a user based on his / her unique physiological and / or behaviour al characteristics.

These characteristics include fingerprints, speech, face, retina, iris, hand-written signature, hand geometry, wrist veins, etc. Biometric systems are being commercially developed for a number of financial and. Many people today have access to their company's information systems by logging in from home. Also, internet services and telephone banking are widely used by the corporate and private sectors.

Therefore to protect one's resources or information with a simple password is not reliable and secure in the world of today. The conventional methods of using keys, access passwords and access cards are being easily overcome by people with criminal intention. Voice signals as a unique behavioral characteristics is proposed in this paper for speaker identification and verification over short distance telephone lines using artificial neural networks. This will address the white collar crimes over the telephone lines. Speakeridentification [1] and verification [2] over telephone lines have been reported but not using artificial neural networks.

Artificial neural networks are intelligent systems that are related in some way to a simplified biological model of the human brain. Attenuation and distortion of voice signals exist over the telephone lines and artificial neural networks, despite a nonlinear, noisy environment, are still good at recognizing and verifying unique characteristics of signals. Multilayer perceptron (MLP) feed forward neural networks trained with back propagation algorithm have been applied to identify bird species using recordings [3]. Speaker identification based on direct voice signals using different types of neural networks have been reported [4, 5].

The work reported in this paper extends the work reported in [5] to short distance telephone networks using ANN architectures described in section 4 of this paper. The feature extraction, the neural network architectures and the software and hardware involved in the development of the speaker identification and verification system are described in this paper. Results with success rates up to 90% in speaker identification and verification over short distance telephone lines using artificial neural networks is reported in this paper. 2. SPEAKER IDENTIFICATION AND VERIFICATION SYSTEM block diagram of a conventional speaker identification / verification system is shown in figure 1.

The system is trained to identify a person's voice by each person speaking out a specific utterance into the microphone. The speech signal is digitized and some digital signal processing is carried out to create a template for the voice pattern and this is stored in memory. The system identifies a speaker by comparing the utterance with the respective template stored in th memory. When a match occurs the speaker is identified. The two important operations in an identifier are the parameter extraction and pattern matching. In distinct patterns are obtained from the utterances of each person and used to create a template.

In pattern matching, the templates created in the parameter extraction process are compared with those stored in memory. Usually correlation techniques a reemployed for traditional pattern matching. ADC ParameterExtractionPatternMatchingMemoryTemplateOutputDevicemicFigure 1: Block Diagram of a Conventional Speaker Identification / Verification System. The speaker identification / verification system over telephone lines investigated in this paper using artificial neural networks is shown in figure 2. FeatureExtractionNeural NetworkClassificationSpeaker IdentityorSpeaker AuthenticityTelephoneSpeech Signal Figure 2: Block Diagram of the Speaker Identification / Verification System using an ANN. In this paper, the speaker identification / verification system reported is a text-dependent type.

The system is trained on a group of people to be identified by each person speaking out the same phrase. The voice is recorded on a standard 16-bit computer sound card from the telephone handset receiver. Although the the human voice ranges from 0 k Hz to 20 k Hz, most of the signal content lies in the 0.3 k Hz to 4 k Hz range. The frequency over the telephone lines is limited to 0.3 k Hz to 3.4 k Hz and this is the frequency band of interest in this work.

Therefore, a sampling rate of 16 kHz satisfying the Nyquist criterion is used. The voices a restored as sound files on the computer. Digital signal processing techniques are used to convert these sound files to a presentable form as input vectors to a neural network. The output of the neural network identifies and verifies the speaker in the group. 3. FEATURE EXTRACTION The process of feature extraction consists of obtaining characteristic parameters of a signal to be used to classify the signal.

The extraction of salient features is a key step in solving any pattern recognition problem. Fo speaker recognition, the features extracted from a speech signal should be consistent with regard to the desired speaker while exhibiting large deviations from the features of an imposter. The selection of from a speech signal is an ongoing issue. Findings report that certain features yield bette performance for some applications than do other features. Ref.

[5] have shown on how the performance can be improved by combining different types of features as inputs to an ANN classifier. Speaker identification and verification over telephone network presents the following challenges: a) Variations in handset microphones which result in severe mismatches between speech data gathered from these microphones. b) Signal distortions due to the telephone channel. c) Inadequate control over speaker / speaking conditions. Consequently, speaker identification and verification systems have not yet reached acceptable levels of performance over the telephone network. Several feature extraction techniques are explored but only th Power Spectral Densities (PSDs) based technique is reported in this paper. The discrete Fourier transform of the telephone voice samples is obtained and the PSDs are computed. The PSDs of three different speakers A, B and C uttering the same phrase is shown in figures 3, 4 and 5 respectively.

Ref. [5] has reported success on speaker identification up to 66% and 90%with PSDs as input vectors to multilayer networks and Self-Organizing Maps (Some) respectively. 4. PATTERN MATCHING USING ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are intelligent systems that are related in some way to a simplified biological model of the human brain. They a recomposed of many simple elements, called neurons, operating in parallel and connected to each other by some multiplies called the connection weights or strengths.

Neural networks are trained by adjusting values of these connection weights between the neurons. Neural networks have a self learning capability, are fault tolerant and noise immune, and have applications in system identification, pattern recognition, classification, speech recognition, image processing, etc. In this paper, ANNs are used for pattern matching. The performance of different neural are investigated for this application.

Thi paper presents results for the MLP feed forward network and the self-organizing feature map. Descriptions of these networks are given below. 4.1. MLP FEEDFORWARD NETWORK three layer feed forward neural network with hidden layer followed by a linear output layers used in this application for pattern matching. The neural network is trained using the algorithm. In this application, an adaptive learning rate is used; that is, the learning rate is adjusted during the training to enhance faster global convergence.

Also, a momentum term is used in algorithm to achieve a faster global convergence. The MLP network in figure 6 is constructed in theMATLAB environment [6]. The input to the MLPnetwork is a vector containing the PSDs. The hidden layer consists of thirty neurons for four speakers. The number of neurons in the output layer depends on the number of speakers and in this paper it is four. sigmoid al activation function linear activation function 1st speaker Nth speakerVectorof PSDs {Figure 6: MLP Network An initial learning rate, an allowable error and the maximum number of training cycles / epochs are the parameters that are specified during the training phase to the MATLAB neural network program. 4.2. SELF-ORGANIZING FEATURE MAPS The second type of neural network selected for this investigation is the self-organizing feature map [7].

This neural network is selected because of its ability to learn a topological mapping of an input data space into a pattern space that defines discrimination or decision surfaces. The operation of this network resembles the classical vector-quantization method called the k-means clustering. Self-organizing feature maps are more general because topologically close nodes are sensitive to inputs that are physically similar. Output nodes will be ordered in a natural manner. Typically, the Kohonen feature map consists of a two dimensional array of linear neurons.

During the training phase the same pattern is presented to the inputs of each neuron, the neuron with the greatest output value is selected as the winner, and its weights are updated according to the following rule: [ ] + = + − 1 'a (1) where wi (t) is the weight vector of neuron i at time t, is the learning rate and x (t) is the training vector. Those neurons within a given distance, the neighborhood, of the winning neuron also have their weights adjusted according to the same rule. This procedure is repeated for each pattern in the training set to complete a training cycle or an epoch. The size of the neighborhood is reduced as the training progresses. In this way the network generates over many cycles an ordered map of the input space, neurons tending to cluster together where input vectors are clustered, similar input patterns tending to excite neurons in similar areas of the network. 5.

IMPLEMENTATION OF THE SPEAKERIDENTIFICATION AND VERIFICATION SYSTEM The work that is being reported in this paper is implemented in software. The telephone speech i captured and processed on a Pentium II 233 MHz computer with a 16 bit sound card. The telephone receiver is interfaced to the sound card. Telephonspeech is captured over signals transmitted within 10 kilometres of transmission network. Digital signal processing and neural network implementations are carried out using the MATLAB signal processing and neural network toolboxes respectively. This work is currently undergoing and an implementation of a identification and verification system lines on a digital signal processor is envisaged.

6. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS The MLP network is trained with the PSDs of eight voice samples recorded at different instants of time under controlled and uncontrolled speaking conditions of four different speakers uttering the same phrase at all times. Controlled speaking conditions refer to noise and distortion free conditions unlike uncontrolled speaking conditions which have noise and distortion on the transmission lines. The number of PSD points for each voice sample is about 500. As mentioned in section 4.1, an adaptive learning rate is used for the MLP network. The initial learning rate is 0.01.

The allowable sum squared error and maximum number of epochs specified to the MATLAB neural network program i 0.01 and 10000 respectively. It is found that the sum squared error goal is reached within 1000 epochs. A success rate of 100% is achieved when the trained MLP network is tested with the same samples used in the training phase. However, when untrained samples are used, only a 63% success rate is obtained. This is due to the inconsistency in the PSDs of the input samples with those used in the training phase. The MLPnetwork is also tested with unseen voice samples of people who are not included in the training set and the network successfully classified these voice samples as unidentified.

Four speakers are identified using the self-organizing feature map like in the case of the MLP network. An initial learning rate of 0.01, an allowable sum squared error of 0.01 and a maximum of 70000 epochs are specified at the start of the training process to theMATLAB neural network program. The results with the self-organizing feature map shows a drastic change in the success rate in identifying the speakers as reported in [5]. With PSDs as inputs, a success rate of 85% and 90% is achieved under uncontrolled and controlled speaking conditions respectively.

Ref. [5] has reported that success rate can be increased to 98% under uncontrolled speaking conditions by using Linear Prediction Coefficients (L PCs) as inputs toS OMs which remains to be yet to be tried out in this work. Currently, with the PSDs as inputs a lot of computations is involved and the SOM takes a lot of time to learn. 7.

CONCLUSIONS This paper has reported on the feasibility of using neural networks for speaker identification and verification over short distance telephone lines and hash own that performance with the self-organizing map is higher compared to that with the multilayer network. Different feature inputs to the remains to be tried out in order to achieve higher identification / verification rates minimizing the training time and the size of the network. Speaker identification with telephone speech signals over long distance telephone lines is investigated using similar techniques. This paper has shown that speaker identification is possible over the telephone lines and therefore telephonic bank and other transactions can be authenticated.

Hence a technique to combat and / or reduce white collar crime. 8.

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