Abstract. Automatic gender recognition through speech is one of the fundamental mechanisms in human-machine interaction. Typical application areas of this technology range from gender-targeted advertising to gender-specific IoT (Internet of Things) applications. It can also be used to narrow down the scope of investigations in crime scenarios.
There are many possible methods of recognizing the gender of a speaker. In machine learning applications, the first step is to acquire and convert the natural human voice into a form of machine understandable signal. Useful voice features then could be extracted and labelled with gender information so that are then trained by machines. After that, new input voice can be captured and processed and the machine is able to extract the features by pattern modelling.
In this thesis, a real-time speaker gender recognition system was designed within Matlab environment. This system could automatically identify the gender of a speaker by voice. The implementation work utilized voice processing and feature extraction techniques to deal with an input speech coming from a microphone or a recorded speech file. The response features are extracted and classified. Then the machine learning classification method (NaΓ―ve Bayes Classifier) is used to distinguish the gender features. The recognition result with gender information is then finally displayed.
The evaluation of the speaker gender recognition systems was done in an experiment with 40 participants (half male and half female) in a quite small room. The experiment recorded 400 speech samples by speakers from 16 countries in 17 languages. These 400 speech samples were tested by the gender recognition system and showed a considerably good performance, with only 29 errors of recognition (92.75% accuracy). In comparison with previous speaker gender recognition systems, most of them obtained the accuracy no more than 90% and only one obtained 100% accuracy with very limited testers. We can then conclude that the performance of the speaker gender recognition system designed in this thesis is reliable
