Text-independent Speaker Verification Using Hybrid Convolutional Neural Networks

Automatic speaker verification is an active research area for more than four decades, and the technology has gradually upgraded for real application. In this paper, a hybrid convolutional neural network (CNN) model is proposed where a combination of the 3D CNN & 2D CNN model is used for speaker verification in the text-independent scenario. For speaker verification, this novel convolutional neural network architecture was built to capture and discard speaker and non-speaker information at the same time. In the training process, the network is trained to differentiate between different identities of a speaker to establish the background model. The model development of the speaker is one of the important aspects. Most conventional techniques employed the d-vector system to create speaker models by means of an average of the features collected from the speaker utterance. Here a hybrid of convolutional neural networks model is utilized in the development and registration phases for building a speaker model. The approach suggested exceeds the existing methods of speaker verification.

A Supervised Learning Method for Improving the Generalization of Speaker Verification Systems by Learning Metrics from a Mean Teacher

The majority of recent speaker verification tasks are studied under open-set evaluation scenarios considering real-world conditions. The characteristics of these tasks imply that the generalization towards unseen speakers is a critical capability. Thus, this study aims to improve the generalization of the system for the performance enhancement of speaker verification. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel supervised-learning-method-based speaker verification system using the mean teacher framework. The mean teacher network refers to the temporal averaging of deep neural network parameters, which can produce a more accurate, stable representations than fixed weights at the end of training and is conventionally used for semi-supervised learning. Leveraging the success of the mean teacher framework in many studies, the proposed supervised learning method exploits the mean teacher network as an auxiliary model for better training of the main model, the student network. By learning the reliable intermediate representations derived from the mean teacher network as well as one-hot speaker labels, the student network is encouraged to explore more discriminative embedding spaces. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method relatively reduces the equal error rate by 11.61%, compared to the baseline system.