EAAI Journal 2025 Journal Article
A review of speaker verification: Methods, network architectures, tasks and challenges
- Weijie Wang
- Hong Zhao
- Yikun Yang
- Yongjuan Yang
Speaker verification is an important branch of biometric recognition, with wide applications in identity authentication, audio monitoring, and other fields. In recent years, deep learning and meta-learning have made remarkable advancements in the field of speaker verification. Therefore, it is necessary to update existing reviews of speaker verification to reflect the latest research developments. We review literature from the past decade to provide a timely and comprehensive survey of the field. First, we outline the concept and system process of speaker verification. Then, we analyze the speech preprocessing process and common acoustic features used in the systems. Next, we present an overview of speaker modeling approaches, covering traditional probabilistic methods, deep learning-based speaker methods, and meta-learning-based speaker methods, focusing on the latter two methods. We provide an in-depth analysis and summary of the characteristics and the latest network architectures of these methods, focusing on the development of Transformer and large-scale pre-trained Transformer. Furthermore, we introduce the datasets and evaluation metrics used in speaker verification systems, focusing on a detailed and fair comparison of the performance of text-dependent and text-independent speaker verification systems. Finally, we explore the challenges faced by speaker verification systems and discuss future research opportunities.