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Universal Background Models

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Biometrics

Synonyms

General model; Person-independent model; UBM; World model

Definition

A Universal Background Model (UBM) is a model used in a biometric verification system to represent general, person-independent feature characteristics to be compared against a model of person-specific feature characteristics when making an accept or reject decision. For example, in a speaker verification system, the UBM is a speaker-independent Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) trained with speech samples from a large set of speakers to represent general speech characteristics. Using a speaker-specific GMM trained with speech samples from a particular enrolled speaker, a likelihood-ratio test for an unknown speech sample can be formed between the match score of the speaker-specific model and the UBM. The UBM may also be used while training the speaker-specific model by acting as a the prior model in Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) parameter estimation.

Likelihood Ratio Test

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Acknowledgment

This work was sponsored by the Department of Defense under Air Force Contract FA8721-05-C-0002. Opinions, interpretations, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the authors and are not necessarily endorsed by the United States Government.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA, USA

    Douglas Reynolds

Authors
  1. Douglas Reynolds
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Biometrics and Security Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Stan Z. Li (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Departments of Computer Science & Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Anil Jain (Professor) (Professor)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Reynolds, D. (2009). Universal Background Models. In: Li, S.Z., Jain, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Biometrics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-73003-5_197

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