On the use of the Bayesian information criterion in multiple speaker detection

Abstract

An efficient scheme, based on the Bayesian information criterion (BIC), for the detection of speaker changes in an audio stream is introduced and investigated. BIC has been the subject of considerable attention in recent years due to its effectiveness for speaker change detection (SCD) as well as the detection of other forms of acoustic changes. A main difficulty in BIC-based SCD has been reported to be that of the computational complexity. The scheme proposed here tackles this problem by reducing the computational load in the previously proposed algorithms significantly, without compromising their effectiveness. The paper describes the new scheme thoroughly and analyses its performance. Experiments are based on 3 hours of broadcast news with 416 speaker changes. With this data, the proposed scheme has been found to be capable of running in about 0.06 times real-time whilst keeping the rate of each of misdetection and false alarm close to 9%.