text: 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.
  @cite_9: 
  @cite_16: We propose a novel framework for speaker recognition in which extraction of sufficient statistics for the state-of-the-art i-vector model is driven by a deep neural network (DNN) trained for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Specifically, the DNN replaces the standard Gaussian mixture model (GMM) to produce frame alignments. The use of an ASR-DNN system in the speaker recognition pipeline is attractive as it integrates the information from speech content directly into the statistics, allowing the standard backends to remain unchanged. Improvement from the proposed framework compared to a state-of-the-art system are of 30 relative at the equal error rate when evaluated on the telephone conditions from the 2012 NIST speaker recognition evaluation (SRE). The proposed framework is a successful way to efficiently leverage transcribed data for speaker recognition, thus opening up a wide spectrum of research directions.
  @cite_4: In this paper we investigate the use of deep neural networks (DNNs) for a small footprint text-dependent speaker verification task. At development stage, a DNN is trained to classify speakers at the frame-level. During speaker enrollment, the trained DNN is used to extract speaker specific features from the last hidden layer. The average of these speaker features, or d-vector, is taken as the speaker model. At evaluation stage, a d-vector is extracted for each utterance and compared to the enrolled speaker model to make a verification decision. Experimental results show the DNN based speaker verification system achieves good performance compared to a popular i-vector system on a small footprint text-dependent speaker verification task. In addition, the DNN based system is more robust to additive noise and outperforms the i-vector system at low False Rejection operating points. Finally the combined system outperforms the i-vector system by 14 and 25 relative in equal error rate (EER) for clean and noisy conditions respectively.
summary: There have been several papers replacing pieces of the traditional speaker recognition system with DNNs. One approach is to train a GMM on bottleneck features extracted from a DNN, and then extract i-vectors @cite_9 . Another DNN-based approach uses an acoustic speech recognition DNN instead of a UBM-GMM to produce frame posteriors for i-vector computation @cite_16 . Ehsan Variani @cite_4 trained DNNs to classify speakers with frame-level acoustic features. The activations of the final hidden layer are averaged over the utterance to create a d-vector'' which replaces the i-vector. These approaches all show improvements upon the traditional i-vector baseline.