Analysis of Large-Scale SVM Training Algorithms for Language and Speaker Recognition

This paper compares a set of large scale support vector machine (SVM) training algorithms for language and speaker recognition tasks.We analyze five approaches for training phonetic and acoustic SVM models for language recognition. We compare the performance of these approaches as a function of the training time required by each of them to reach convergence, and we discuss their scalability towards large corpora. Two of these algorithms can be used in speaker recognition to train a SVM that classifies pairs of utterances as either belonging to the same speaker or to two different speakers. Our results show that the accuracy of these algorithms is asymptotically equivalent, but they have different behavior with respect to the time required to converge. Some of these algorithms not only scale linearly with the training set size, but are also able to give their best results after just a few iterations. State-of-the-art performance has been obtained in the female subset of the NIST 2010 Speaker Recognition Evaluation extended core test using a single SVM syste

Factorized Sub-Space Estimation for Fast and Memory Effective I-vector Extraction

Most of the state-of-the-art speaker recognition systems use a compact representation of spoken utterances referred to as i-vector. Since the "standard" i-vector extraction procedure requires large memory structures and is relatively slow, new approaches have recently been proposed that are able to obtain either accurate solutions at the expense of an increase of the computational load, or fast approximate solutions, which are traded for lower memory costs. We propose a new approach particularly useful for applications that need to minimize their memory requirements. Our solution not only dramatically reduces the memory needs for i-vector extraction, but is also fast and accurate compared to recently proposed approaches. Tested on the female part of the tel-tel extended NIST 2010 evaluation trials, our approach substantially improves the performance with respect to the fastest but inaccurate eigen-decomposition approach, using much less memory than other method

I–vector transformation and scaling for PLDA based speaker recognition

This paper proposes a density model transformation for speaker recognition systems based on i–vectors and Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis (PLDA) classification. The PLDA model assumes that the i-vectors are distributed according to the standard normal distribution, whereas it is well known that this is not the case. Experiments have shown that the i–vector are better modeled, for example, by a Heavy–Tailed distribution, and that significant improvement of the classification performance can be obtained by whitening and length normalizing the i-vectors. In this work we propose to transform the i–vectors, extracted ignoring the classifier that will be used, so that their distribution becomes more suitable to discriminate speakers using PLDA. This is performed by means of a sequence of affine and non–linear transformations whose parameters are obtained by Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation on the training set. The second contribution of this work is the reduction of the mismatch between the development and test i–vector distributions by means of a scaling factor tuned for the estimated i-vector distribution, rather than by means of a blind length normalization. Our tests performed on the NIST SRE-2010 and SRE-2012 evaluation sets show that improvement of their Cost Functions of the order of 10% can be obtained for both evaluation data

Fast and Memory Effective I-Vector Extraction Using a Factorized Sub-Space

Most of the state-of-the-art speaker recognition systems use a compact representation of spoken utterances referred to as i-vectors. Since the "standard" i-vector extraction procedure requires large memory structures and is relatively slow, new approaches have recently been proposed that are able to obtain either accurate solutions at the expense of an increase of the computational load, or fast approximate solutions, which are traded for lower memory costs. We propose a new approach particularly useful for applications that need to minimize their memory requirements. Our solution not only dramatically reduces the storage needs for i-vector extraction, but is also fast. Tested on the female part of the tel-tel extended NIST 2010 evaluation trials, our approach substantially improves the performance with respect to the fastest but inaccurate eigen-decomposition approach, using much less memory than any other known method

Scoring heterogeneous speaker vectors using nonlinear transformations and tied PLDa models

Most current state-of-the-art text-independent speaker recognition systems are based on i-vectors, and on probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA). PLDA assumes that the i-vectors of a trial are homogeneous, i.e., that they have been extracted by the same system. In other words, the enrollment and test i-vectors belong to the same class. However, it is sometimes important to score trials including “heterogeneous” i-vectors, for instance, enrollment i-vectors extracted by an old system, and test i-vectors extracted by a newer, more accurate, system. In this paper, we introduce a PLDA model that is able to score heterogeneous i-vectors independent of their extraction approach, dimensions, and any other characteristics that make a set of i-vectors of the same speaker belong to different classes. The new model, which will be referred to as nonlinear tied-PLDA (NL-Tied-PLDA), is obtained by a generalization of our recently proposed nonlinear PLDA approach, which jointly estimates the PLDA parameters and the parameters of a nonlinear transformation of the i-vectors. The generalization consists of estimating a class-dependent nonlinear transformation of the i-vectors, with the constraint that the transformed i-vectors of the same speaker share the same speaker factor. The resulting model is flexible and accurate, as assessed by the results of a set of experiments performed on the extended core NIST SRE 2012 evaluation. In particular, NL-Tied-PLDA provides better results on heterogeneous trials with respect to the corresponding homogeneous trials scored by the old system, and, in some configurations, it also reaches the accuracy of the new system. Similar results were obtained on the female-extended core NIST SRE 2010 telephone condition

Memory and computation trade-offs for efficient i-vector extraction

This work aims at reducing the memory demand of the data structures that are usually pre-computed and stored for fast computation of the i-vectors, a compact representation of spoken utterances that is used by most state-of-the-art speaker recognition systems. We propose two new approaches allowing accurate i-vector extraction but requiring less memory, showing their relations with the standard computation method introduced for eigenvoices, and with the recently proposed fast eigen-decomposition technique. The first approach computes an i-vector in a Variational Bayes (VB) framework by iterating the estimation of one sub-block of i-vector elements at a time, keeping fixed all the others, and can obtain i-vectors as accurate as the ones obtained by the standard technique but requiring only 25% of its memory. The second technique is based on the Conjugate Gradient solution of a linear system, which is accurate and uses even less memory, but is slower than the VB approach. We analyze and compare the time and memory resources required by all these solutions, which are suited to different applications, and we show that it is possible to get accurate results greatly reducing memory demand compared with the standard solution at almost the same speed