Optimization of Gaussian mixture model parameters for speaker identification

Gaussian mixture model (GMM) [1] has been widely used for modeling speakers. In speaker identification, one major problem is how to generate a set of GMMs for identification purposes based upon the training data. Due to the hill-climbing characteristic of the maximum likelihood (ML) method, any arbitrary estimate of the initial model parameters will usually lead to a sub-optimal model in practice. To resolve this problem, this paper proposes a hybrid training method based on the genetic algorithm (GA). It utilizes the global searching capability of the GA and combines the effectiveness of the ML method. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.