Cross-domain Adaptation with Discrepancy Minimization for Text-independent Forensic Speaker Verification

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cross-domain adaptation method for forensic speaker verification that aligns domain-specific distributions in the embedding space, improving performance across diverse acoustic environments.

Contribution

It proposes a novel discrepancy minimization approach using MMD for cross-domain adaptation in forensic speaker verification, leveraging a new multi-environment dataset.

Findings

Cross-domain adaptation improves speaker verification accuracy.

Diverse acoustic environments significantly impact performance.

Discrepancy minimization enhances generalization across domains.

Abstract

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.