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 the prior model in maximum a posteriori (MAP) parameter estimation.
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Acknowledgements
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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Reynolds, D. (2015). Universal Background Models. In: Li, S.Z., Jain, A.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Biometrics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7488-4_197
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7488-4_197
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