No Arabic abstract
In forensic applications, it is very common that only small naturalistic datasets consisting of short utterances in complex or unknown acoustic environments are available. In this study, we propose a pipeline solution to improve speaker verification on a small actual forensic field dataset. By leveraging large-scale out-of-domain datasets, a knowledge distillation based objective function is proposed for teacher-student learning, which is applied for short utterance forensic speaker verification. The objective function collectively considers speaker classification loss, Kullback-Leibler divergence, and similarity of embeddings. In order to advance the trained deep speaker embedding network to be robust for a small target dataset, we introduce a novel strategy to fine-tune the pre-trained student model towards a forensic target domain by utilizing the model as a finetuning start point and a reference in regularization. The proposed approaches are evaluated on the 1st48-UTD forensic corpus, a newly established naturalistic dataset of actual homicide investigations consisting of short utterances recorded in uncontrolled conditions. We show that the proposed objective function can efficiently improve the performance of teacher-student learning on short utterances and that our fine-tuning strategy outperforms the commonly used weight decay method by providing an explicit inductive bias towards the pre-trained model.
In this paper, we study a novel technique that exploits the interaction between speaker traits and linguistic content to improve both speaker verification and utterance verification performance. We implement an idea of speaker-utterance dual attention (SUDA) in a unified neural network. The dual attention refers to an attention mechanism for the two tasks of speaker and utterance verification. The proposed SUDA features an attention mask mechanism to learn the interaction between the speaker and utterance information streams. This helps to focus only on the required information for respective task by masking the irrelevant counterparts. The studies conducted on RSR2015 corpus confirm that the proposed SUDA outperforms the framework without attention mask as well as several competitive systems for both speaker and utterance verification.
Forensic audio analysis for speaker verification offers unique challenges due to location/scenario uncertainty and diversity mismatch between reference and naturalistic field recordings. The lack of real naturalistic forensic audio corpora with ground-truth speaker identity represents a major challenge in this field. It is also difficult to directly employ small-scale domain-specific data to train complex neural network architectures due to domain mismatch and loss in performance. Alternatively, cross-domain speaker verification for multiple acoustic environments is a challenging task which could advance research in audio forensics. In this study, we introduce a CRSS-Forensics audio dataset collected in multiple acoustic environments. We pre-train a CNN-based network using the VoxCeleb data, followed by an approach which fine-tunes part of the high-level network layers with clean speech from CRSS-Forensics. Based on this fine-tuned model, we align domain-specific distributions in the embedding space with the discrepancy loss and maximum mean discrepancy (MMD). This maintains effective performance on the clean set, while simultaneously generalizes the model to other acoustic domains. From the results, we demonstrate that diverse acoustic environments affect the speaker verification performance, and that our proposed approach of cross-domain adaptation can significantly improve the results in this scenario.
Speaker diarization is one of the actively researched topics in audio signal processing and machine learning. Utterance clustering is a critical part of a speaker diarization task. In this study, we aim to improve the performance of utterance clustering by processing multichannel (stereo) audio signals. We generated processed audio signals by combining left- and right-channel audio signals in a few different ways and then extracted embedded features (also called d-vectors) from those processed audio signals. We applied the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) for supervised utterance clustering. In the training phase, we used a parameter sharing GMM to train the model for each speaker. In the testing phase, we selected the speaker with the maximum likelihood as the detected speaker. Results of experiments with real audio recordings of multi-person discussion sessions showed that our proposed method that used multichannel audio signals achieved significantly better performance than a conventional method with mono audio signals.
In this work, we present the system description of the UIAI entry for the short-duration speaker verification (SdSV) challenge 2020. Our focus is on Task 1 dedicated to text-dependent speaker verification. We investigate different feature extraction and modeling approaches for automatic speaker verification (ASV) and utterance verification (UV). We have also studied different fusion strategies for combining UV and ASV modules. Our primary submission to the challenge is the fusion of seven subsystems which yields a normalized minimum detection cost function (minDCF) of 0.072 and an equal error rate (EER) of 2.14% on the evaluation set. The single system consisting of a pass-phrase identification based model with phone-discriminative bottleneck features gives a normalized minDCF of 0.118 and achieves 19% relative improvement over the state-of-the-art challenge baseline.
A number of studies have successfully developed speaker verification or presentation attack detection systems. However, studies integrating the two tasks remain in the preliminary stages. In this paper, we propose two approaches for building an integrated system of speaker verification and presentation attack detection: an end-to-end monolithic approach and a back-end modular approach. The first approach simultaneously trains speaker identification, presentation attack detection, and the integrated system using multi-task learning using a common feature. However, through experiments, we hypothesize that the information required for performing speaker verification and presentation attack detection might differ because speaker verification systems try to remove device-specific information from speaker embeddings, while presentation attack detection systems exploit such information. Therefore, we propose a back-end modular approach using a separate deep neural network (DNN) for speaker verification and presentation attack detection. This approach has thee input components: two speaker embeddings (for enrollment and test each) and prediction of presentation attacks. Experiments are conducted using the ASVspoof 2017-v2 dataset, which includes official trials on the integration of speaker verification and presentation attack detection. The proposed back-end approach demonstrates a relative improvement of 21.77% in terms of the equal error rate for integrated trials compared to a conventional speaker verification system.