Improved MFCC-Based Feature for Robust Speaker Identification

The Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) is the most widely used feature in speech and speaker recognition. However, MFCC is very sensitive to noise interference, which tends to drastically de- grade the performance of recognition systems because of the mismatches between training and testing. In this paper, the logarithmic transformation in the standard MFCC analysis is replaced by a combined function to improve the noisy sensitivity. The proposed feature extraction process is also combined with speech en- hancement methods, such as spectral subtraction and median-filter to further suppress the noise. Experi- ments show that the proposed robust MFCC-based feature significantly reduces the recognition error rate over a wide signal-to-noise ratio range.