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Encyclopedia of Biometrics pp 1547–1550Cite as

Universal Background Models

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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.

figure 201 figure 201

Universal Background ModelsAlternative hypothesis modeling and...

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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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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lincoln Laboratory, MIT, Lexington, MA, USA

    Douglas Reynolds

Authors
  1. Douglas Reynolds
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Biometrics and Security, Research & National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Stan Z. Li

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

    Anil K. Jain

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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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