NPLDA: A Deep Neural PLDA Model for Speaker Verification

The state-of-art approach for speaker verification consists of a neural network based embedding extractor along with a backend generative model such as the Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis (PLDA). In this work, we propose a neural network approach for backend modeling in speaker recognition. The likelihood ratio score of the generative PLDA model is posed as a discriminative similarity function and the learnable parameters of the score function are optimized using a verification cost. The proposed model, termed as neural PLDA (NPLDA), is initialized using the generative PLDA model parameters. The loss function for the NPLDA model is an approximation of the minimum detection cost function (DCF). The speaker recognition experiments using the NPLDA model are performed on the speaker verificiation task in the VOiCES datasets as well as the SITW challenge dataset. In these experiments, the NPLDA model optimized using the proposed loss function improves significantly over the state-of-art PLDA based speaker verification system.Comment: Published in Odyssey 2020, the Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop (VOiCES Special Session). Link to GitHub Implementation: https://github.com/iiscleap/NeuralPlda. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2001.0703

ECAPA-TDNN: Emphasized Channel Attention, Propagation and Aggregation in TDNN Based Speaker Verification

Current speaker verification techniques rely on a neural network to extract speaker representations. The successful x-vector architecture is a Time Delay Neural Network (TDNN) that applies statistics pooling to project variable-length utterances into fixed-length speaker characterizing embeddings. In this paper, we propose multiple enhancements to this architecture based on recent trends in the related fields of face verification and computer vision. Firstly, the initial frame layers can be restructured into 1-dimensional Res2Net modules with impactful skip connections. Similarly to SE-ResNet, we introduce Squeeze-and-Excitation blocks in these modules to explicitly model channel interdependencies. The SE block expands the temporal context of the frame layer by rescaling the channels according to global properties of the recording. Secondly, neural networks are known to learn hierarchical features, with each layer operating on a different level of complexity. To leverage this complementary information, we aggregate and propagate features of different hierarchical levels. Finally, we improve the statistics pooling module with channel-dependent frame attention. This enables the network to focus on different subsets of frames during each of the channel's statistics estimation. The proposed ECAPA-TDNN architecture significantly outperforms state-of-the-art TDNN based systems on the VoxCeleb test sets and the 2019 VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge.Comment: proceedings of INTERSPEECH 202

Build a SRE Challenge System: Lessons from VoxSRC 2022 and CNSRC 2022

Different speaker recognition challenges have been held to assess the speaker verification system in the wild and probe the performance limit. Voxceleb Speaker Recognition Challenge (VoxSRC), based on the voxceleb, is the most popular. Besides, another challenge called CN-Celeb Speaker Recognition Challenge (CNSRC) is also held this year, which is based on the Chinese celebrity multi-genre dataset CN-Celeb. This year, our team participated in both speaker verification closed tracks in CNSRC 2022 and VoxSRC 2022, and achieved the 1st place and 3rd place respectively. In most system reports, the authors usually only provide a description of their systems but lack an effective analysis of their methods. In this paper, we will outline how to build a strong speaker verification challenge system and give a detailed analysis of each method compared with some other popular technical means

Visualizing Classifier Adjacency Relations: A Case Study in Speaker Verification and Voice Anti-Spoofing

Whether it be for results summarization, or the analysis of classifier fusion, some means to compare different classifiers can often provide illuminating insight into their behaviour, (dis)similarity or complementarity. We propose a simple method to derive 2D representation from detection scores produced by an arbitrary set of binary classifiers in response to a common dataset. Based upon rank correlations, our method facilitates a visual comparison of classifiers with arbitrary scores and with close relation to receiver operating characteristic (ROC) and detection error trade-off (DET) analyses. While the approach is fully versatile and can be applied to any detection task, we demonstrate the method using scores produced by automatic speaker verification and voice anti-spoofing systems. The former are produced by a Gaussian mixture model system trained with VoxCeleb data whereas the latter stem from submissions to the ASVspoof 2019 challenge.Comment: Accepted to Interspeech 2021. Example code available at https://github.com/asvspoof-challenge/classifier-adjacenc

Enhancing speaker verification accuracy with deep ensemble learning and inclusion of multifaceted demographic factors

Effective speaker identification is essential for achieving robust speaker recognition in real-world applications such as mobile devices, security, and entertainment while ensuring high accuracy. However, deep learning models trained on large datasets with diverse demographic and environmental factors may lead to increased misclassification and longer processing times. This study proposes incorporating ethnicity and gender information as critical parameters in a deep learning model to enhance accuracy. Two convolutional neural network (CNN) models classify gender and ethnicity, followed by a Siamese deep learning model trained with critical parameters and additional features for speaker verification. The proposed model was tested using the VoxCeleb 2 database, which includes over one million utterances from 6,112 celebrities. In an evaluation after 500 epochs, equal error rate (EER) and minimum decision cost function (minDCF) showed notable results, scoring 1.68 and 0.10, respectively. The proposed model outperforms existing deep learning models, demonstrating improved performance in terms of reduced misclassification errors and faster processing times