1 research outputs found
DeepVOX: Discovering Features from Raw Audio for Speaker Recognition in Degraded Audio Signals
Automatic speaker recognition algorithms typically use pre-defined
filterbanks, such as Mel-Frequency and Gammatone filterbanks, for
characterizing speech audio. The design of these filterbanks is based on
domain-knowledge and limited empirical observations. The resultant features,
therefore, may not generalize well to different types of audio degradation. In
this work, we propose a deep learning-based technique to induce the filterbank
design from vast amounts of speech audio. The purpose of such a filterbank is
to extract features robust to degradations in the input audio. To this effect,
a 1D convolutional neural network is designed to learn a time-domain filterbank
called DeepVOX directly from raw speech audio. Secondly, an adaptive triplet
mining technique is developed to efficiently mine the data samples best suited
to train the filterbank. Thirdly, a detailed ablation study of the DeepVOX
filterbanks reveals the presence of both vocal source and vocal tract
characteristics in the extracted features. Experimental results on VOXCeleb2,
NIST SRE 2008 and 2010, and Fisher speech datasets demonstrate the efficacy of
the DeepVOX features across a variety of audio degradations, multi-lingual
speech data, and varying-duration speech audio. The DeepVOX features also
improve the performance of existing speaker recognition algorithms, such as the
xVector-PLDA and the iVector-PLDA