2,132 research outputs found
Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis for Acoustic Modeling
Acoustic models using probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA)
capture the correlations within feature vectors using subspaces which do not
vastly expand the model. This allows high dimensional and correlated feature
spaces to be used, without requiring the estimation of multiple high dimension
covariance matrices. In this letter we extend the recently presented PLDA
mixture model for speech recognition through a tied PLDA approach, which is
better able to control the model size to avoid overfitting. We carried out
experiments using the Switchboard corpus, with both mel frequency cepstral
coefficient features and bottleneck feature derived from a deep neural network.
Reductions in word error rate were obtained by using tied PLDA, compared with
the PLDA mixture model, subspace Gaussian mixture models, and deep neural
networks
Time-Contrastive Learning Based Deep Bottleneck Features for Text-Dependent Speaker Verification
There are a number of studies about extraction of bottleneck (BN) features
from deep neural networks (DNNs)trained to discriminate speakers, pass-phrases
and triphone states for improving the performance of text-dependent speaker
verification (TD-SV). However, a moderate success has been achieved. A recent
study [1] presented a time contrastive learning (TCL) concept to explore the
non-stationarity of brain signals for classification of brain states. Speech
signals have similar non-stationarity property, and TCL further has the
advantage of having no need for labeled data. We therefore present a TCL based
BN feature extraction method. The method uniformly partitions each speech
utterance in a training dataset into a predefined number of multi-frame
segments. Each segment in an utterance corresponds to one class, and class
labels are shared across utterances. DNNs are then trained to discriminate all
speech frames among the classes to exploit the temporal structure of speech. In
addition, we propose a segment-based unsupervised clustering algorithm to
re-assign class labels to the segments. TD-SV experiments were conducted on the
RedDots challenge database. The TCL-DNNs were trained using speech data of
fixed pass-phrases that were excluded from the TD-SV evaluation set, so the
learned features can be considered phrase-independent. We compare the
performance of the proposed TCL bottleneck (BN) feature with those of
short-time cepstral features and BN features extracted from DNNs discriminating
speakers, pass-phrases, speaker+pass-phrase, as well as monophones whose labels
and boundaries are generated by three different automatic speech recognition
(ASR) systems. Experimental results show that the proposed TCL-BN outperforms
cepstral features and speaker+pass-phrase discriminant BN features, and its
performance is on par with those of ASR derived BN features. Moreover,....Comment: Copyright (c) 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted.
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ROBUST SPEAKER RECOGNITION BASED ON LATENT VARIABLE MODELS
Automatic speaker recognition in uncontrolled environments is a very challenging task due to channel distortions, additive noise and reverberation. To address these issues, this thesis studies probabilistic latent variable models of short-term spectral information that leverage large amounts of data to achieve robustness in challenging conditions.
Current speaker recognition systems represent an entire speech utterance as a single point in a high-dimensional space. This representation is known as "supervector". This thesis starts by analyzing the properties of this representation. A novel visualization procedure of supervectors is presented by which qualitative insight about the information being captured is obtained. We then propose the use of an overcomplete dictionary to explicitly decompose a supervector into a speaker-specific component and an undesired variability component. An algorithm to learn the dictionary from a large collection of data is discussed and analyzed. A subset of the entries of the dictionary is learned to represent speaker-specific information and another subset to represent distortions. After encoding the supervector as a linear combination of the dictionary entries, the undesired variability is removed by discarding the contribution of the distortion components. This paradigm is closely related to the previously proposed paradigm of Joint Factor Analysis modeling of supervectors. We establish a connection between the two approaches and show how our proposed method provides improvements in terms of computation and recognition accuracy.
An alternative way to handle undesired variability in supervector representations is to first project them into a lower dimensional space and then to model them in the reduced subspace. This low-dimensional projection is known as "i-vector". Unfortunately, i-vectors exhibit non-Gaussian behavior, and direct statistical modeling requires the use of heavy-tailed distributions for optimal performance. These approaches lack closed-form solutions, and therefore are hard to analyze. Moreover, they do not scale well to large datasets. Instead of directly modeling i-vectors, we propose to first apply a non-linear transformation and then use a linear-Gaussian model. We present two alternative transformations and show experimentally that the transformed i-vectors can be optimally modeled by a simple linear-Gaussian model (factor analysis). We evaluate our method on a benchmark dataset with a large amount of channel variability and show that the results compare favorably against the competitors. Also, our approach has closed-form solutions and scales gracefully to large datasets.
Finally, a multi-classifier architecture trained on a multicondition fashion is proposed to address the problem of speaker recognition in the presence of additive noise. A large number of experiments are conducted to analyze the proposed architecture and to obtain guidelines for optimal performance in noisy environments. Overall, it is shown that multicondition training of multi-classifier architectures not only produces great robustness in the anticipated conditions, but also generalizes well to unseen conditions
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