Speaker Recognition in a handheld computer

Abstract: Handheld computers are widely used, be it a mobile phone, personal digital assistant (PDA), or a media player. Although these devices are personal, often a small set of persons can use a given device, for example a group of friends or a family. The most natural way to communicate for most humans is through speech. Therefore a natural way for these devices to know who is using them is for the device to listen to the user’s speech, i.e., to recognize the speaker based upon their speech. This project exploits the microphone built into most of these devices and asks whether it is possible to develop an effective speaker recognition system which can operate within the limited resources of these devices (as compared to a desktop PC). The goal of this speaker recognition is to distinguish between the small set of people that could share a handheld device and those outside of this small set. Therefore the criteria is that the device should work for any of the members of this small set and not work for anyone outside of this small set. Furthermore, within this small set the device should recognize which specific person within this small group is using it. An application for a Windows Mobile PDA has been developed using C++. This application and its underlying theoretical concepts, as well as parts of the code and the results obtained (in terms of accuracy rate and performance) are presented in this thesis. The experiments conducted within this research indicate that it is feasible to recognize the user based upon their speech is within a small group and further more to identify which member of the group is the user. This has great potential for automatically configuring devices within a home or office environment for the specific user. Potentially all a user needs to do is speak within hearing range of the device to identify themselves to the device. The device in turn can configure itself for this user.