Gender Recognition Based on the Stacking of Different Acoustic Features

Abstract

A speech signal can provide various information about a speaker, such as their gender, age, accent, and emotional state. The gender of the speaker is the most salient piece of information contained in the speech signal and is directly or indirectly used in many applications. In this study, a new approach is proposed for recognizing the gender of the speaker based on the use of hybrid features created by stacking different types of features. For this purpose, four different features, namely Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), Mel scaled power spectrogram (Mel Spectrogram), Chroma, Spectral contrast (Contrast), and Tonal Centroid (Tonnetz), and twelve hybrid features created by stacking these features were used. These features were applied to four different classifiers, two of which were based on traditional machine learning (KNN and LDA) while two were based on the deep learning approach (CNN and MLP), and the performance of each was evaluated separately. In the experiments conducted on the Turkish subset of the Common Voice dataset, it was observed that hybrid features, created by stacking different acoustic features, led to improvements in gender recognition accuracy ranging from 0.3 to 1.73%.