Improved i-Vector Representation for Speaker Diarization

This paper proposes using a previously well-trained deep neural network (DNN) to enhance the i-vector representation used for speaker diarization. In effect, we replace the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) typically used to train a Universal Background Model (UBM), with a DNN that has been trained using a different large scale dataset. To train the T-matrix we use a supervised UBM obtained from the DNN using filterbank input features to calculate the posterior information, and then MFCC features to train the UBM instead of a traditional unsupervised UBM derived from single features. Next we jointly use DNN and MFCC features to calculate the zeroth and first order Baum-Welch statistics for training an extractor from which we obtain the i-vector. The system will be shown to achieve a significant improvement on the NIST 2008 speaker recognition evaluation (SRE) telephone data task compared to state-of-the-art approaches

Continuous Robust Sound Event Classification Using Time-Frequency Features and Deep Learning

The automatic detection and recognition of sound events by computers is a requirement for a number of emerging sensing and human computer interaction technologies. Recent advances in this field have been achieved by machine learning classifiers working in conjunction with time-frequency feature representations. This combination has achieved excellent accuracy for classification of discrete sounds. The ability to recognise sounds under real-world noisy conditions, called robust sound event classification, is an especially challenging task that has attracted recent research attention. Another aspect of real-word conditions is the classification of continuous, occluded or overlapping sounds, rather than classification of short isolated sound recordings. This paper addresses the classification of noise-corrupted, occluded, overlapped, continuous sound recordings. It first proposes a standard evaluation task for such sounds based upon a common existing method for evaluating isolated sound classification. It then benchmarks several high performing isolated sound classifiers to operate with continuous sound data by incorporating an energy-based event detection front end. Results are reported for each tested system using the new task, to provide the first analysis of their performance for continuous sound event detection. In addition it proposes and evaluates a novel Bayesian-inspired front end for the segmentation and detection of continuous sound recordings prior to classification