Speaker Verification on Summed–Channel Conditions with Confidence Measures

Verificación de locutor en condiciones de canal sumado con medidas de confianza

Carlos Vaquero Avilés Casco, Jesús Villalba López, Alfonso Ortega Giménez, and Eduardo Lleida Solano

Communications Technology Group (GTC), Aragón Institute for Engineering Research (I3A), University of Zaragoza, Spain. E–mail: cvaquero@unizar.es, villalba@unizar.es, ortega@unizar.es, lleida@unizar.es

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of speaker verification in two speaker conversations, proposing a set of confidence measures to assess the quality of a given speaker segmentation. We study how these measures can be used to estimate the performance of a state–of–the–art speaker verification system, the I3A submission for the core–summed condition in the NIST SRE 2010. We present a Factor Analysis based speaker segmentation system, along with three confidence measures that are fused to obtain a single measure that we show to constitute a good estimation of the segmentation accuracy, when evaluated on the summed–channel telephone data of the NIST SRE 2008. Finally we present speaker verification results obtained with the I3A submission for the NIST SRE 2010 on several conditions of this evaluation, involving summed–channel. We show that the confidence measure also predicts the performance of a state–of–the art speaker verification system when it faces two speaker conversations.

Keywords: Confidence measures, speaker segmentation, speaker verification and telephone conversations.

Resumen

Este artículo trata el problema de verificación de locutor en conversaciones con dos locutores, proponiendo un conjunto de medidas de confianza para evaluar la calidad de una segmentación de locutores dada. Estudiamos cómo estas medidas pueden ser utilizadas para estimar el rendimiento de un sistema de verificación del locutor del estado del arte, el sistema del I3A para la evaluación de reconocimiento del locutor NIST SRE 2010. Presentamos un sistema de segmentación de locutor basado en Análisis Factorial y tres medidas de confianza que son combinadas en una medida que constituye una buena estimación de la calidad de la segmentación, cuando se evalúa en las grabaciones de canal sumado de la NIST SRE 2008. Finalmente presentamos resultados de verificación de locutor obtenidos con el sistema del I3A en distintas condiciones de canal sumado de la NIST SRE 2010. Se demuestra que las medidas de confianza también predicen el rendimiento de un sistema de verificación del locutor cuando se enfrenta a conversaciones de dos locutores.

Palabras clave: Medidas de confianza, segmentación de locutor, verificación de locutor y conversaciones telefónicas.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by project TIN2008–06856–C05–04 and FPU program of MEC of the Spanish government.

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