Entropy analysis of i-vector feature spaces in duration-sensitive speaker recognition

The vast majority of speaker recognition cross-entropy evaluations are focused on score domain. By examining the generalized relative distance between genuine and impostor sub-spaces, biometric characteristics become comparable to other authentication approaches. In this paper we demonstrate that the i-vector feature space's biometric information measured by relative entropy is comparable to e.g., knowledge-based mechanisms or face recognition. Examining NIST SRE 2004-2010 corpora, short samples of e.g, 5 seconds duration, comprise already 127 bits in a text-independent scenario. Further, the vast majority of short samples does not fall below 50% of the biometric information of samples having a duration of more than 40 seconds. The generalized i-vector feature space entropy of long samples corresponds to 182.1 bits, and the highest lower entropy bound of a subject was observed at 471.6 bits.