Patent ID: 7606707

Claim:
A speaker recognition apparatus comprising: means for obtaining a weighted vector distance, which is based on a first weight, between voice feature vectors of a first voice feature vector sequence produced from a voice of a speaker to be registered, for clustering the first voice feature vector sequence based on the obtained weighted vector distance, and for producing a codebook including a plurality of representative vectors; means for storing the produced codebook; means for obtaining a weighted quantization distance, which is based on a second weight, between corresponding ones of the plurality of representative vectors stored in the codebook and each voice feature vector of a second voice feature vector sequence produced from a voice of a speaker to be recognized, for quantizing each said voice feature vector of the second voice feature vector sequence based on the obtained weighted quantization distance, and for obtaining a weighted quantization distortion, which is based on a third weight which differs from the first weight and the second weight, between the corresponding ones of the plurality of representative vectors stored in the codebook and each said voice feature vector of the second voice feature vector sequence; and means for executing speaker recognition based on the quantization distortion.