37,041 research outputs found
Target-Speaker Voice Activity Detection: a Novel Approach for Multi-Speaker Diarization in a Dinner Party Scenario
Speaker diarization for real-life scenarios is an extremely challenging
problem. Widely used clustering-based diarization approaches perform rather
poorly in such conditions, mainly due to the limited ability to handle
overlapping speech. We propose a novel Target-Speaker Voice Activity Detection
(TS-VAD) approach, which directly predicts an activity of each speaker on each
time frame. TS-VAD model takes conventional speech features (e.g., MFCC) along
with i-vectors for each speaker as inputs. A set of binary classification
output layers produces activities of each speaker. I-vectors can be estimated
iteratively, starting with a strong clustering-based diarization. We also
extend the TS-VAD approach to the multi-microphone case using a simple
attention mechanism on top of hidden representations extracted from the
single-channel TS-VAD model. Moreover, post-processing strategies for the
predicted speaker activity probabilities are investigated. Experiments on the
CHiME-6 unsegmented data show that TS-VAD achieves state-of-the-art results
outperforming the baseline x-vector-based system by more than 30% Diarization
Error Rate (DER) abs.Comment: Accepted to Interspeech 202
Speaker tracking system using speaker boundary detection
This thesis is about a research conducted in the area of Speaker Recognition. The application is concerned to the automatic detection and tracking of target speakers in meetings, conferences, telephone conversations and in radio and television broadcasts. A Speaker Tracking system is developed here, in collaboration with the Center for Language and Speech Technologies and Applications (TALP) in UPC. The main objective of this Speaker Tracking system is to answer the question: When the target speaker speaks? The system uses training speech data for the target speaker in the pre-enrollment stage. Three main modules have been designed for this Speaker Tracking system. In the first module an energy based Speech Activity Detection is applied to select the speech parts of the audio. In the second module the audio is segmented according to the speaker turning points. In the last module a Speaker Verification is implemented in which the target speakers are verified and tracked. Two different approaches are applied in this last module. In the first approach for Speaker Verification, the target speakers and the segments are modeled using the state-of-the-art, Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM). In the second approach for Speaker Verification, the identity vectors (i-vectors) representation is applied for the target speakers and the segments. Finally, the performance of both these approaches is compared for the results evaluation
Emotion Recognition from Acted and Spontaneous Speech
Dizertační práce se zabývá rozpoznáním emočního stavu mluvčích z řečového signálu. Práce je rozdělena do dvou hlavních častí, první část popisuju navržené metody pro rozpoznání emočního stavu z hraných databází. V rámci této části jsou představeny výsledky rozpoznání použitím dvou různých databází s různými jazyky. Hlavními přínosy této části je detailní analýza rozsáhlé škály různých příznaků získaných z řečového signálu, návrh nových klasifikačních architektur jako je například „emoční párování“ a návrh nové metody pro mapování diskrétních emočních stavů do dvou dimenzionálního prostoru. Druhá část se zabývá rozpoznáním emočních stavů z databáze spontánní řeči, která byla získána ze záznamů hovorů z reálných call center. Poznatky z analýzy a návrhu metod rozpoznání z hrané řeči byly využity pro návrh nového systému pro rozpoznání sedmi spontánních emočních stavů. Jádrem navrženého přístupu je komplexní klasifikační architektura založena na fúzi různých systémů. Práce se dále zabývá vlivem emočního stavu mluvčího na úspěšnosti rozpoznání pohlaví a návrhem systému pro automatickou detekci úspěšných hovorů v call centrech na základě analýzy parametrů dialogu mezi účastníky telefonních hovorů.Doctoral thesis deals with emotion recognition from speech signals. The thesis is divided into two main parts; the first part describes proposed approaches for emotion recognition using two different multilingual databases of acted emotional speech. The main contributions of this part are detailed analysis of a big set of acoustic features, new classification schemes for vocal emotion recognition such as “emotion coupling” and new method for mapping discrete emotions into two-dimensional space. The second part of this thesis is devoted to emotion recognition using multilingual databases of spontaneous emotional speech, which is based on telephone records obtained from real call centers. The knowledge gained from experiments with emotion recognition from acted speech was exploited to design a new approach for classifying seven emotional states. The core of the proposed approach is a complex classification architecture based on the fusion of different systems. The thesis also examines the influence of speaker’s emotional state on gender recognition performance and proposes system for automatic identification of successful phone calls in call center by means of dialogue features.
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Real-time decoding of question-and-answer speech dialogue using human cortical activity.
Natural communication often occurs in dialogue, differentially engaging auditory and sensorimotor brain regions during listening and speaking. However, previous attempts to decode speech directly from the human brain typically consider listening or speaking tasks in isolation. Here, human participants listened to questions and responded aloud with answers while we used high-density electrocorticography (ECoG) recordings to detect when they heard or said an utterance and to then decode the utterance's identity. Because certain answers were only plausible responses to certain questions, we could dynamically update the prior probabilities of each answer using the decoded question likelihoods as context. We decode produced and perceived utterances with accuracy rates as high as 61% and 76%, respectively (chance is 7% and 20%). Contextual integration of decoded question likelihoods significantly improves answer decoding. These results demonstrate real-time decoding of speech in an interactive, conversational setting, which has important implications for patients who are unable to communicate
Anti-spoofing Methods for Automatic SpeakerVerification System
Growing interest in automatic speaker verification (ASV)systems has lead to
significant quality improvement of spoofing attackson them. Many research works
confirm that despite the low equal er-ror rate (EER) ASV systems are still
vulnerable to spoofing attacks. Inthis work we overview different acoustic
feature spaces and classifiersto determine reliable and robust countermeasures
against spoofing at-tacks. We compared several spoofing detection systems,
presented so far,on the development and evaluation datasets of the Automatic
SpeakerVerification Spoofing and Countermeasures (ASVspoof) Challenge
2015.Experimental results presented in this paper demonstrate that the useof
magnitude and phase information combination provides a substantialinput into
the efficiency of the spoofing detection systems. Also wavelet-based features
show impressive results in terms of equal error rate. Inour overview we compare
spoofing performance for systems based on dif-ferent classifiers. Comparison
results demonstrate that the linear SVMclassifier outperforms the conventional
GMM approach. However, manyresearchers inspired by the great success of deep
neural networks (DNN)approaches in the automatic speech recognition, applied
DNN in thespoofing detection task and obtained quite low EER for known and
un-known type of spoofing attacks.Comment: 12 pages, 0 figures, published in Springer Communications in Computer
and Information Science (CCIS) vol. 66
Polyphonic Sound Event Detection by using Capsule Neural Networks
Artificial sound event detection (SED) has the aim to mimic the human ability
to perceive and understand what is happening in the surroundings. Nowadays,
Deep Learning offers valuable techniques for this goal such as Convolutional
Neural Networks (CNNs). The Capsule Neural Network (CapsNet) architecture has
been recently introduced in the image processing field with the intent to
overcome some of the known limitations of CNNs, specifically regarding the
scarce robustness to affine transformations (i.e., perspective, size,
orientation) and the detection of overlapped images. This motivated the authors
to employ CapsNets to deal with the polyphonic-SED task, in which multiple
sound events occur simultaneously. Specifically, we propose to exploit the
capsule units to represent a set of distinctive properties for each individual
sound event. Capsule units are connected through a so-called "dynamic routing"
that encourages learning part-whole relationships and improves the detection
performance in a polyphonic context. This paper reports extensive evaluations
carried out on three publicly available datasets, showing how the CapsNet-based
algorithm not only outperforms standard CNNs but also allows to achieve the
best results with respect to the state of the art algorithms
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