Speaker Verification using Convolutional Neural Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel CNN-based approach for speaker verification that uses a Siamese framework to enhance discriminative power and robustness, outperforming traditional methods.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new CNN architecture combined with Siamese fine-tuning to improve speaker verification accuracy and robustness against within-speaker variations.

Findings

Outperforms traditional speaker verification methods

Creates more discriminative speaker models

Enhances robustness to speaker variation

Abstract

In this paper, a novel Convolutional Neural Network architecture has been developed for speaker verification in order to simultaneously capture and discard speaker and non-speaker information, respectively. In training phase, the network is trained to distinguish between different speaker identities for creating the background model. One of the crucial parts is to create the speaker models. Most of the previous approaches create speaker models based on averaging the speaker representations provided by the background model. We overturn this problem by further fine-tuning the trained model using the Siamese framework for generating a discriminative feature space to distinguish between same and different speakers regardless of their identity. This provides a mechanism which simultaneously captures the speaker-related information and create robustness to within-speaker variations. It is demonstrated that the proposed method outperforms the traditional verification methods which create speaker models directly from the background model.