Quality Measures for Speaker Verification with Short Utterances

The performances of the automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems degrade due to the reduction in the amount of speech used for enrollment and verification. Combining multiple systems based on different features and classifiers considerably reduces speaker verification error rate with short utterances. This work attempts to incorporate supplementary information during the system combination process. We use quality of the estimated model parameters as supplementary information. We introduce a class of novel quality measures formulated using the zero-order sufficient statistics used during the i-vector extraction process. We have used the proposed quality measures as side information for combining ASV systems based on Gaussian mixture model-universal background model (GMM-UBM) and i-vector. The proposed methods demonstrate considerable improvement in speaker recognition performance on NIST SRE corpora, especially in short duration conditions. We have also observed improvement over existing systems based on different duration-based quality measures.Comment: Accepted for publication in Digital Signal Processing: A Review Journa

Quality Measures for Speaker Verification with Short Utterances

International audienceThe performances of the automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems degrade due to the reduction in amount of speech used for enrollment and verification. Combining multiple systems based on different features and classifiers considerably reduces speaker verification error rate with short utterances. This work attempts to incorporate supplementary information during the system combination process. We use quality of the estimated model parameters as a supplementary information. We introduce a class of novel quality measures formulated using the zero-order sufficient statistics used during the i-vector extraction process. We have used the proposed quality measures as side information for combining ASV systems based on Gaussian mixture model-universal background model (GMM-UBM) and i-vector. Considerable improvement is found in performance metrics by the proposed system on NIST SRE corpora in short duration conditions. We have observed improvement over state-of-the-art i-vector system

Bayesian distance metric learning on i-vector for speaker verification

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 63-66).This thesis explores the use of Bayesian distance metric learning (Bayes_dml) for the task of speaker verification using the i-vector feature representation. We propose a framework that explores the distance constraints between i-vector pairs from the same speaker and different speakers. With an approximation of the distance metric as a weighted covariance matrix of the top eigenvectors from the data covariance matrix, variational inference is used to estimate a posterior distribution of the distance metric. Given speaker labels, we select different-speaker data pairs with the highest cosine scores to form a different-speaker constraint set. This set captures the most discriminative between-speaker variability that exists in the training data. This system is evaluated on the female part of the 2008 NIST SRE dataset. Cosine similarity scoring, as the state-of-the-art approach, is compared to Bayes-dml. Experimental results show the comparable performance between Bayes_dml and cosine similarity scoring. Furthermore, Bayes-dml is insensitive to score normalization, as compared to cosine similarity scoring. Without the requirement of the number of labeled examples, Bayes_dml performs better in the context of limited training databy Xiao Fang.S.M

Optimization of data-driven filterbank for automatic speaker verification

Most of the speech processing applications use triangular filters spaced in mel-scale for feature extraction. In this paper, we propose a new data-driven filter design method which optimizes filter parameters from a given speech data. First, we introduce a frame-selection based approach for developing speech-signal-based frequency warping scale. Then, we propose a new method for computing the filter frequency responses by using principal component analysis (PCA). The main advantage of the proposed method over the recently introduced deep learning based methods is that it requires very limited amount of unlabeled speech-data. We demonstrate that the proposed filterbank has more speaker discriminative power than commonly used mel filterbank as well as existing data-driven filterbank. We conduct automatic speaker verification (ASV) experiments with different corpora using various classifier back-ends. We show that the acoustic features created with proposed filterbank are better than existing mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and speech-signal-based frequency cepstral coefficients (SFCCs) in most cases. In the experiments with VoxCeleb1 and popular i-vector back-end, we observe 9.75% relative improvement in equal error rate (EER) over MFCCs. Similarly, the relative improvement is 4.43% with recently introduced x-vector system. We obtain further improvement using fusion of the proposed method with standard MFCC-based approach.Comment: Published in Digital Signal Processing journal (Elsevier

Discriminative features for GMM and i-vector based speaker diarization

Speaker diarization has received several research attentions over the last decade. Among the different domains of speaker diarization, diarization in meeting domain is the most challenging one. It usually contains spontaneous speech and is, for example, susceptible to reverberation. The appropriate selection of speech features is one of the factors that affect the performance of speaker diarization systems. Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) are the most widely used short-term speech features in speaker diarization. Other factors that affect the performance of speaker diarization systems are the techniques employed to perform both speaker segmentation and speaker clustering. In this thesis, we have proposed the use of jitter and shimmer long-term voice-quality features both for Gaussian Mixture Modeling (GMM) and i-vector based speaker diarization systems. The voice-quality features are used together with the state-of-the-art short-term cepstral and long-term speech ones. The long-term features consist of prosody and Glottal-to-Noise excitation ratio (GNE) descriptors. Firstly, the voice-quality, prosodic and GNE features are stacked in the same feature vector. Then, they are fused with cepstral coefficients at the score likelihood level both for the proposed Gaussian Mixture Modeling (GMM) and i-vector based speaker diarization systems. For the proposed GMM based speaker diarization system, independent HMM models are estimated from the short-term and long-term speech feature sets. The fusion of the short-term descriptors with the long-term ones in speaker segmentation is carried out by linearly weighting the log-likelihood scores of Viterbi decoding. In the case of speaker clustering, the fusion of the short-term cepstral features with the long-term ones is carried out by linearly fusing the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) scores corresponding to these feature sets. For the proposed i-vector based speaker diarization system, the speaker segmentation is carried out exactly the same as in the previously mentioned GMM based speaker diarization system. However, the speaker clustering technique is based on the recently introduced factor analysis paradigm. Two set of i-vectors are extracted from the speaker segmentation hypothesis. Whilst the first i-vector is extracted from short-term cepstral features, the second one is extracted from the voice quality, prosody and GNE descriptors. Then, the cosine-distance and Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis (PLDA) scores of i-vectors are linearly weighted to obtain a fused similarity score. Finally, the fused score is used as speaker clustering distance. We have also proposed the use of delta dynamic features for speaker clustering. The motivation for using deltas in clustering is that delta dynamic features capture the transitional characteristics of the speech signal which contain speaker specific information. This information is not captured by the static cepstral coefficients. The delta features are used together with the short-term static cepstral coefficients and long-term speech features (i.e., voice-quality, prosody and GNE) both for GMM and i-vector based speaker diarization systems. The experiments have been carried out on Augmented Multi-party Interaction (AMI) meeting corpus. The experimental results show that the use of voice-quality, prosody, GNE and delta dynamic features improve the performance of both GMM and i-vector based speaker diarization systems.La diarización del altavoz ha recibido varias atenciones de investigación durante la última década. Entre los diferentes dominios de la diarización del hablante, la diarización en el dominio del encuentro es la más difícil. Normalmente contiene habla espontánea y, por ejemplo, es susceptible de reverberación. La selección apropiada de las características del habla es uno de los factores que afectan el rendimiento de los sistemas de diarización de los altavoces. Los Coeficientes Cepstral de Frecuencia Mel (MFCC) son las características de habla de corto plazo más utilizadas en la diarización de los altavoces. Otros factores que afectan el rendimiento de los sistemas de diarización del altavoz son las técnicas empleadas para realizar tanto la segmentación del altavoz como el agrupamiento de altavoces. En esta tesis, hemos propuesto el uso de jitter y shimmer características de calidad de voz a largo plazo tanto para GMM y i-vector basada en sistemas de diarización de altavoces. Las características de calidad de voz se utilizan junto con el estado de la técnica a corto plazo cepstral y de larga duración de habla. Las características a largo plazo consisten en la prosodia y los descriptores de relación de excitación Glottal-a-Ruido (GNE). En primer lugar, las características de calidad de voz, prosódica y GNE se apilan en el mismo vector de características. A continuación, se fusionan con coeficientes cepstrales en el nivel de verosimilitud de puntajes tanto para los sistemas de diarización de altavoces basados ¿¿en el modelo Gaussian Mixture Modeling (GMM) como en los sistemas basados ¿¿en i-vector. . Para el sistema de diarización de altavoces basado en GMM propuesto, se calculan modelos HMM independientes a partir de cada conjunto de características. En la segmentación de los altavoces, la fusión de los descriptores a corto plazo con los de largo plazo se lleva a cabo mediante la ponderación lineal de las puntuaciones log-probabilidad de decodificación Viterbi. En la agrupación de altavoces, la fusión de las características cepstrales a corto plazo con las de largo plazo se lleva a cabo mediante la fusión lineal de las puntuaciones Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) correspondientes a estos conjuntos de características. Para el sistema de diarización de altavoces basado en un vector i, la fusión de características se realiza exactamente igual a la del sistema basado en GMM antes mencionado. Sin embargo, la técnica de agrupación de altavoces se basa en el paradigma de análisis de factores recientemente introducido. Dos conjuntos de i-vectores se extraen de la hipótesis de segmentación de altavoz. Mientras que el primer vector i se extrae de características espectrales a corto plazo, el segundo se extrae de los descriptores de calidad de voz apilados, prosódicos y GNE. A continuación, las puntuaciones de coseno-distancia y Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis (PLDA) entre i-vectores se ponderan linealmente para obtener una puntuación de similitud fundida. Finalmente, la puntuación fusionada se utiliza como distancia de agrupación de altavoces. También hemos propuesto el uso de características dinámicas delta para la agrupación de locutores. La motivación para el uso de deltas en la agrupación es que las características dinámicas delta capturan las características de transición de la señal de voz que contienen información específica del locutor. Esta información no es capturada por los coeficientes cepstrales estáticos. Las características delta se usan junto con los coeficientes cepstrales estáticos a corto plazo y las características de voz a largo plazo (es decir, calidad de voz, prosodia y GNE) tanto para sistemas de diarización de altavoces basados en GMM como en sistemas i-vector. Los resultados experimentales sobre AMI muestran que el uso de calidad vocal, prosódica, GNE y dinámicas delta mejoran el rendimiento de los sistemas de diarización de altavoces basados en GMM e i-vector.Postprint (published version

Open-set Speaker Identification

This study is motivated by the growing need for effective extraction of intelligence and evidence from audio recordings in the fight against crime, a need made ever more apparent with the recent expansion of criminal and terrorist organisations. The main focus is to enhance open-set speaker identification process within the speaker identification systems, which are affected by noisy audio data obtained under uncontrolled environments such as in the street, in restaurants or other places of businesses. Consequently, two investigations are initially carried out including the effects of environmental noise on the accuracy of open-set speaker recognition, which thoroughly cover relevant conditions in the considered application areas, such as variable training data length, background noise and real world noise, and the effects of short and varied duration reference data in open-set speaker recognition. The investigations led to a novel method termed “vowel boosting” to enhance the reliability in speaker identification when operating with varied duration speech data under uncontrolled conditions. Vowels naturally contain more speaker specific information. Therefore, by emphasising this natural phenomenon in speech data, it enables better identification performance. The traditional state-of-the-art GMM-UBMs and i-vectors are used to evaluate “vowel boosting”. The proposed approach boosts the impact of the vowels on the speaker scores, which improves the recognition accuracy for the specific case of open-set identification with short and varied duration of speech material

Continuous Emotion Prediction from Speech: Modelling Ambiguity in Emotion

There is growing interest in emotion research to model perceived emotion labelled as intensities along the affect dimensions such as arousal and valence. These labels are typically obtained from multiple annotators who would have their individualistic perceptions of emotional speech. Consequently, emotion prediction models that incorporate variation in individual perceptions as ambiguity in the emotional state would be more realistic. This thesis develops the modelling framework necessary to achieve continuous prediction of ambiguous emotional states from speech. Besides, emotion labels, feature space distribution and encoding are an integral part of the prediction system. The first part of this thesis examines the limitations of current low-level feature distributions and their minimalistic statistical descriptions. Specifically, front-end paralinguistic acoustic features are reflective of speech production mechanisms. However, discriminatively learnt features have frequently outperformed acoustic features in emotion prediction tasks, but provide no insights into the physical significance of these features. One of the contributions of this thesis is the development of a framework that can modify the acoustic feature representation based on emotion label information. Another investigation in this thesis indicates that emotion perception is language-dependent and in turn, helped develop a framework for cross-language emotion prediction. Furthermore, this investigation supported the hypothesis that emotion perception is highly individualistic and is better modelled as a distribution rather than a point estimate to encode information about the ambiguity in the perceived emotion. Following this observation, the thesis proposes measures to quantify the appropriateness of distribution types in modelling ambiguity in dimensional emotion labels which are then employed to compare well-known bounded parametric distributions. These analyses led to the conclusion that the beta distribution was the most appropriate parametric model of ambiguity in emotion labels. Finally, the thesis focuses on developing a deep learning framework for continuous emotion prediction as a temporal series of beta distributions, examining various parameterizations of the beta distributions as well as loss functions. Furthermore, distribution over the parameter spaces is examined and priors from kernel density estimation are employed to shape the posteriors over the parameter space which significantly improved valence ambiguity predictions. The proposed frameworks and methods have been extensively evaluated on multiple state of-the-art databases and the results demonstrate both the viability of predicting ambiguous emotion states and the validity of the proposed systems

IberSPEECH 2020: XI Jornadas en Tecnología del Habla and VII Iberian SLTech

IberSPEECH2020 is a two-day event, bringing together the best researchers and practitioners in speech and language technologies in Iberian languages to promote interaction and discussion. The organizing committee has planned a wide variety of scientific and social activities, including technical paper presentations, keynote lectures, presentation of projects, laboratories activities, recent PhD thesis, discussion panels, a round table, and awards to the best thesis and papers. The program of IberSPEECH2020 includes a total of 32 contributions that will be presented distributed among 5 oral sessions, a PhD session, and a projects session. To ensure the quality of all the contributions, each submitted paper was reviewed by three members of the scientific review committee. All the papers in the conference will be accessible through the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Online Archive. Paper selection was based on the scores and comments provided by the scientific review committee, which includes 73 researchers from different institutions (mainly from Spain and Portugal, but also from France, Germany, Brazil, Iran, Greece, Hungary, Czech Republic, Ucrania, Slovenia). Furthermore, it is confirmed to publish an extension of selected papers as a special issue of the Journal of Applied Sciences, “IberSPEECH 2020: Speech and Language Technologies for Iberian Languages”, published by MDPI with fully open access. In addition to regular paper sessions, the IberSPEECH2020 scientific program features the following activities: the ALBAYZIN evaluation challenge session.Red Española de Tecnologías del Habla. Universidad de Valladoli