Deep Speaker Feature Learning for Text-independent Speaker Verification

Recently deep neural networks (DNNs) have been used to learn speaker features. However, the quality of the learned features is not sufficiently good, so a complex back-end model, either neural or probabilistic, has to be used to address the residual uncertainty when applied to speaker verification, just as with raw features. This paper presents a convolutional time-delay deep neural network structure (CT-DNN) for speaker feature learning. Our experimental results on the Fisher database demonstrated that this CT-DNN can produce high-quality speaker features: even with a single feature (0.3 seconds including the context), the EER can be as low as 7.68%. This effectively confirmed that the speaker trait is largely a deterministic short-time property rather than a long-time distributional pattern, and therefore can be extracted from just dozens of frames.Comment: deep neural networks, speaker verification, speaker featur

Prosodic-Enhanced Siamese Convolutional Neural Networks for Cross-Device Text-Independent Speaker Verification

In this paper a novel cross-device text-independent speaker verification architecture is proposed. Majority of the state-of-the-art deep architectures that are used for speaker verification tasks consider Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients. In contrast, our proposed Siamese convolutional neural network architecture uses Mel-frequency spectrogram coefficients to benefit from the dependency of the adjacent spectro-temporal features. Moreover, although spectro-temporal features have proved to be highly reliable in speaker verification models, they only represent some aspects of short-term acoustic level traits of the speaker's voice. However, the human voice consists of several linguistic levels such as acoustic, lexicon, prosody, and phonetics, that can be utilized in speaker verification models. To compensate for these inherited shortcomings in spectro-temporal features, we propose to enhance the proposed Siamese convolutional neural network architecture by deploying a multilayer perceptron network to incorporate the prosodic, jitter, and shimmer features. The proposed end-to-end verification architecture performs feature extraction and verification simultaneously. This proposed architecture displays significant improvement over classical signal processing approaches and deep algorithms for forensic cross-device speaker verification.Comment: Accepted in 9th IEEE International Conference on Biometrics: Theory, Applications, and Systems (BTAS 2018

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