Deep Speaker: an End-to-End Neural Speaker Embedding System

Chao Li, Xiaokong Ma, Bing Jiang, Xiangang Li, Xuewei Zhang, Xiao Liu, Ying Cao, Ajay Kannan, Zhenyao Zhu

arXiv (Cornell University) · 2017 · 427 citations · 13 references

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TL;DR

Embeddings generated by Deep Speaker can be applied to speaker identification, verification, and clustering. The study introduces Deep Speaker, a neural system that maps utterances onto a hypersphere where speaker similarity is measured by cosine similarity. It extracts acoustic features with ResCNN and GRU networks, mean‑pools them into utterance‑level embeddings, and trains with triplet loss based on cosine similarity. On three datasets, Deep Speaker outperforms a DNN‑based i‑vector baseline, reducing verification EER by 50% and increasing identification accuracy by 60%, while cross‑lingual adaptation from Mandarin further improves English speaker recognition.

Abstract

We present Deep Speaker, a neural speaker embedding system that maps utterances to a hypersphere where speaker similarity is measured by cosine similarity. The embeddings generated by Deep Speaker can be used for many tasks, including speaker identification, verification, and clustering. We experiment with ResCNN and GRU architectures to extract the acoustic features, then mean pool to produce utterance-level speaker embeddings, and train using triplet loss based on cosine similarity. Experiments on three distinct datasets suggest that Deep Speaker outperforms a DNN-based i-vector baseline. For example, Deep Speaker reduces the verification equal error rate by 50% (relatively) and improves the identification accuracy by 60% (relatively) on a text-independent dataset. We also present results that suggest adapting from a model trained with Mandarin can improve accuracy for English speaker recognition.

References

13