  Most of the speech processing applications use triangular filters spaced in
mel-scale for feature extraction. In this paper, we propose a new data-driven
filter design method which optimizes filter parameters from a given speech
data. First, we introduce a frame-selection based approach for developing
speech-signal-based frequency warping scale. Then, we propose a new method for
computing the filter frequency responses by using principal component analysis
(PCA). The main advantage of the proposed method over the recently introduced
deep learning based methods is that it requires very limited amount of
unlabeled speech-data. We demonstrate that the proposed filterbank has more
speaker discriminative power than commonly used mel filterbank as well as
existing data-driven filterbank. We conduct automatic speaker verification
(ASV) experiments with different corpora using various classifier back-ends. We
show that the acoustic features created with proposed filterbank are better
than existing mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and
speech-signal-based frequency cepstral coefficients (SFCCs) in most cases. In
the experiments with VoxCeleb1 and popular i-vector back-end, we observe 9.75%
relative improvement in equal error rate (EER) over MFCCs. Similarly, the
relative improvement is 4.43% with recently introduced x-vector system. We
obtain further improvement using fusion of the proposed method with standard
MFCC-based approach.

Audio and Speech Processing;Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition;Sound