Voice-Based Age and Gender Recognition: A Comparative Study of LSTM, RezoNet and Hybrid CNNs-BiLSTM Architecture

In this study, we compared three architectures for the task of age and gender recognition from voice data: Long Short-Term Memory networks (LSTM), Hybrid of Convolutional Neural Networks and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (CNNs-BiLSTM), and the recently released RezoNet architecture. The dataset used in this study was sourced from Mozilla Common Voice in Japanese. Features such as pitch, magnitude, Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), and filter-bank energies were extracted from the voice data for signal processing, and the three architectures were evaluated. Our evaluation revealed that LSTM was slightly less accurate than RezoNet (83.1%), with the hybrid CNNs-BiLSTM (93.1%) and LSTM achieving the highest accuracy for gender recognition (93.5%). However, hybrid CNNs-BiLSTM architecture outperformed the other models in age recognition, achieving an accuracy of 69.75%, compared to 64.25% and 44.88% for LSTM and RezoNet, respectively. Using Japanese language data and the extracted characteristics, the hybrid CNNs-BiLSTM architecture model demonstrated the highest accuracy in both tests, highlighting its efficacy in voice-based age and gender detection. These results suggest promising avenues for future research and practical applications in this field.