France Telecom Establissement Autonome De Droit Public

Luc Mathan

Frederic Bimbot

A process and apparatus for measuring the resemblance between sound samples incorporating a learning phase and a test phase, each having a digital acquisition and preprocessing stage, an order p acoustic analysis stage and a p.times.p covariance matrix calculating stage with respect to the resulting vector signal, the learning phase also having a reference X covariance matrix inversion stage and a stage of storing the thus obtained matrix X.sup.-1 in a dictionary, the test phase incorporating a stage of multiplying the covariance matrix of test Y with the reference matrix X.sup.-1, a stage of extracting all or part of the p eigenvalues .lambda.k of said matrix product and a calculating stage using a family of functions f, called generalized sphericity functions, so as to obtain a digital value measuring the resemblance between the considered test sample and the reference samples of the dictionary. Alternative implementations are also described, which advantageously allow the same result to be obtained without requiring the explicit calculation of eigenvalues.

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Lannion, France

Luc Mathan