Recent advances in speaker recognition

This paper introduces recent advances in speaker recognition technology. The first part discusses general topics and issues. The second part is devoted to a discussion of more specific topics of recent interest that have led to interesting new approaches and techniques. They include VQ- and ergodic-HMM-based text-independent recognition methods, a text-prompted recognition method, parameter/distance normalization and model adaptation techniques, and methods of updating models and a priori thresholds in speaker verification. Although many recent advances and successes have been achieved in speaker recognition, there are still many problems for which good solutions remain to be found. The last part of this paper describes 16 open questions about speaker recognition. The paper concludes with a short discussion assessing the current status and future possibilities. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.