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

Improving Multi-Scale Aggregation Using Feature Pyramid Module for Robust Speaker Verification of Variable-Duration Utterances

Currently, the most widely used approach for speaker verification is the deep speaker embedding learning. In this approach, we obtain a speaker embedding vector by pooling single-scale features that are extracted from the last layer of a speaker feature extractor. Multi-scale aggregation (MSA), which utilizes multi-scale features from different layers of the feature extractor, has recently been introduced and shows superior performance for variable-duration utterances. To increase the robustness dealing with utterances of arbitrary duration, this paper improves the MSA by using a feature pyramid module. The module enhances speaker-discriminative information of features from multiple layers via a top-down pathway and lateral connections. We extract speaker embeddings using the enhanced features that contain rich speaker information with different time scales. Experiments on the VoxCeleb dataset show that the proposed module improves previous MSA methods with a smaller number of parameters. It also achieves better performance than state-of-the-art approaches for both short and long utterances.Comment: Accepted to Interspeech 202

Attentive Statistics Pooling for Deep Speaker Embedding

This paper proposes attentive statistics pooling for deep speaker embedding in text-independent speaker verification. In conventional speaker embedding, frame-level features are averaged over all the frames of a single utterance to form an utterance-level feature. Our method utilizes an attention mechanism to give different weights to different frames and generates not only weighted means but also weighted standard deviations. In this way, it can capture long-term variations in speaker characteristics more effectively. An evaluation on the NIST SRE 2012 and the VoxCeleb data sets shows that it reduces equal error rates (EERs) from the conventional method by 7.5% and 8.1%, respectively.Comment: Proc. Interspeech 2018, pp2252--2256. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1809.0931