Exploiting jump-resonance hysteresis in silicon auditory front-ends for extracting speaker discriminative formant trajectories

Jump-resonance is a phenomenon observed in nonlinear circuits where the amplitude of the output signal exhibits an abrupt jump when the frequency of the input signal is varied. For filters used in the design of analog auditory front-ends (AFEs), jump-resonance is generally considered to be undesirable and several techniques have been proposed in literature to avoid or alleviate this artifact. In this paper we explore the use of jump-resonance based hysteresis in band-pass filters for encoding speech formant trajectories. Using prototypes of silicon AFEs fabricated in a 0.5 CMOS process, we demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach for extracting speaker discriminative features. These benefits are validated using speaker recognition experiments where consistent improvements in equal-error-rates (EERs) are achieved using the jump-resonance based features as compared to conventional features.