Is it possible to predict speaker’s body size and oral cavity characteristics from speech signals: a preliminary study on Mandarin Chinese

This paper proposes a study on whether the speaker’s body size (height, weight) and oral cavity (lip protrusion LP, lip opening LO, front cavity FC) characteristics can be predicted based on the acoustic features of speech. Firstly, Pearson’s correlation analysis was first conducted to examine the relationships between acoustic features and body size and oral cavity characteristics. Further, the effects of acoustic features in predicting body size and oral cavity characteristics were examined using random forest and decision tree models. The results showed that fundamental frequency statistics (i.e., mean, max, min) exhibited significant negative correlations with height, weight, and FC. Besides, good accuracies of classification in height, LP range, LO range, and FC range could be achieved based on the acoustic features. The findings in the current paper imply that acoustic features could be the potential features for identification of the speaker’s body size and oral cavity characteristics. This paper will not only contribute to the research and practices in forensic speaker profiling and but also provides foundations for the technology of automatic speaker recognition.