Patent ID: 7617102

Claim:
A speaker identifying apparatus for identifying a speaker, based on a prescribed vocal tract geometrical parameter representing shapes of vocal tracts of a plurality of speakers uttering a prescribed phoneme, speech data of said plurality of speakers uttering said prescribed phoneme, and speech data of said speaker to be identified uttering the prescribed phoneme, comprising: principal component analyzing means for performing principal component analysis on said vocal tract geometrical parameters of the plurality of speakers, and for calculating an average value of said vocal tract geometrical parameters and a prescribed number of higher order principal component vectors representing speaker-dependent variations of said vocal tract geometrical parameters; feature calculating means for performing acoustic analysis on speech data of each of the plurality of speakers uttering said prescribed phoneme, and calculating a plurality of prescribed features related to the speech data; principal component coefficient calculating means for calculating principal component coefficients for approximating said vocal tract geometrical parameter of each of said plurality of speakers by a linear sum of said prescribed number of principal component vectors; multiple regression analyzing means for determining, by multiple regression analysis, sequence of coefficients for estimating said principal component coefficients calculated by said principal component coefficient calculating means for the speaker of interest, by a linear sum of said plurality of prescribed features calculated by said feature calculating means; estimating means for calculating said plurality of features related to the speech that are the same as those calculated by said feature calculating means from the speech data of the speaker to be identified uttering said prescribed phoneme, and for estimating principal component coefficients for calculating said vocal tract geometrical parameter of said speaker to be identified, by a linear sum obtained by applying the sequence of coefficients calculated by said multiple regression analyzing means to the plurality of features; and identifying means for comparing the principal component coefficients estimated by said estimating means with the principal component coefficients calculated for each of said plurality of speakers by said principal component coefficient calculating means, and thereby for identifying said speaker to be identified.