In a log-likelihood ratio (LLR)-based speaker verification system, the alternative hypothesis is usually difficult to characterize a priori, since the model should cover the space of all possible impostors. In this paper, we propose a new LLR measure in an attempt to characterize the alternative hypothesis in a more effective and robust way than conventional methods. This LLR measure can be further formulated as a non-linear discriminant classifier and solved by kernel-based techniques, such as the Kernel Fisher Discriminant (KFD) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The results of experiments on two speaker verification tasks show
that the proposed methods outperform classical LLR-based approaches.