Factorization of Discriminatively Trained i-vector Extractor for Speaker Recognition

In this work, we continue in our research on i-vector extractor for speaker verification (SV) and we optimize its architecture for fast and effective discriminative training. We were motivated by computational and memory requirements caused by the large number of parameters of the original generative i-vector model. Our aim is to preserve the power of the original generative model, and at the same time focus the model towards extraction of speaker-related information. We show that it is possible to represent a standard generative i-vector extractor by a model with significantly less parameters and obtain similar performance on SV tasks. We can further refine this compact model by discriminative training and obtain i-vectors that lead to better performance on various SV benchmarks representing different acoustic domains.Comment: Submitted to Interspeech 2019, Graz, Austria. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1810.1318

Joint 3D Proposal Generation and Object Detection from View Aggregation

We present AVOD, an Aggregate View Object Detection network for autonomous driving scenarios. The proposed neural network architecture uses LIDAR point clouds and RGB images to generate features that are shared by two subnetworks: a region proposal network (RPN) and a second stage detector network. The proposed RPN uses a novel architecture capable of performing multimodal feature fusion on high resolution feature maps to generate reliable 3D object proposals for multiple object classes in road scenes. Using these proposals, the second stage detection network performs accurate oriented 3D bounding box regression and category classification to predict the extents, orientation, and classification of objects in 3D space. Our proposed architecture is shown to produce state of the art results on the KITTI 3D object detection benchmark while running in real time with a low memory footprint, making it a suitable candidate for deployment on autonomous vehicles. Code is at: https://github.com/kujason/avodComment: For any inquiries contact aharakeh(at)uwaterloo(dot)c

Text-Independent Speaker Verification Using 3D Convolutional Neural Networks

In this paper, a novel method using 3D Convolutional Neural Network (3D-CNN) architecture has been proposed for speaker verification in the text-independent setting. One of the main challenges is the creation of the speaker models. Most of the previously-reported approaches create speaker models based on averaging the extracted features from utterances of the speaker, which is known as the d-vector system. In our paper, we propose an adaptive feature learning by utilizing the 3D-CNNs for direct speaker model creation in which, for both development and enrollment phases, an identical number of spoken utterances per speaker is fed to the network for representing the speakers' utterances and creation of the speaker model. This leads to simultaneously capturing the speaker-related information and building a more robust system to cope with within-speaker variation. We demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the traditional d-vector verification system. Moreover, the proposed system can also be an alternative to the traditional d-vector system which is a one-shot speaker modeling system by utilizing 3D-CNNs.Comment: Accepted to be published in IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) 201