Gender classification using pitch and formants

Abstract

A gender classification system is proposed based on pitch, formants and combination of both. Ten Hindi digits database has been prepared for fifty speakers. Each Speaker has spoken each digit ten times. Formants derived from speech samples have been used for gender classification. Gender classification has been also done by using pitch extracted from different methods. Autocorrelation, Cepstrum and Average Magnitude Difference (AMDF) methods have been used for pitch determination from speech samples. Formants in combination with pitch are also used for gender classification. A feature vector consisting of pitches derived from all the above mentioned pitch determination methods was also used for gender classification. Experiments were performed for both open-set and closed-set gender classification. Autocorrelation method performed best for gender classification in open-set. Hybrid method (Autocorrelation +AMDF+ Cepstrum) performed best for gender classification in closed-set.