Integration of speech separation, diarization, and recognition for multi-speaker meetings: System description, comparison, and analysis
The Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；Microsoft Corp（微软公司）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）
Desh Raj, Pavel Denisov, Zhuo Chen, Hakan Erdogan, Zili Huang, Maokui He, Shinji Watanabe, Jun Du, Takuya Yoshioka, Yi Luo, Naoyuki Kanda, Jinyu Li, Scott Wisdom, John R. Hershey
Multi-speaker speech recognition of unsegmented recordings has diverse applications such as meeting transcription and automatic subtitle generation. With technical advances in systems dealing with speech separation, speaker diarization, and automatic speech recognition (ASR) in the last decade, it has become possible to build pipelines that achieve reasonable error rates on this task. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end modular system for the LibriCSS meeting data, which combines independently trained separation, diarization, and recognition components, in that order. We study the effect of different state-of-the-art methods at each stage of the pipeline, and report results using task-specific metrics like SDR and DER, as well as downstream WER. Experiments indicate that the problem of overlapping speech for diarization and ASR can be effectively mitigated with the presence of a well-trained separation module. Our best system achieves a speaker-attributed WER of 12.7%, which is close to that of a non-overlapping ASR.
We provide the technical report for Ego4D audio-only diarization challenge in ECCV 2022. Speaker diarization takes the audio streams as input and outputs the homogeneous segments according to the speaker's identity. It aims to solve the problem of "Who spoke when." In this paper, we explore a Detection-based method to tackle the audio-only speaker diarization task. Our method first extracts audio features by audio backbone and then feeds the feature to a detection-generate network to get the speaker proposals. Finally, after postprocessing, we can get the diarization results. The validation da…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
In this paper, we present a novel framework that jointly performs three tasks: speaker diarization, speech separation, and speaker counting. Our proposed framework integrates speaker diarization based on end-to-end neural diarization (EEND) models, speaker counting with encoder-decoder based attractors (EDA), and speech separation using Conv-TasNet. In addition, we propose a multiple 1x1 convolutional layer architecture for estimating the separation masks corresponding to a flexible number of speakers and a fusion technique for refining the separated speech signal with obtained speaker diariza…
Speaker diarization is an important pre-processing step for many speech applications, and it aims to solve the "who spoke when" problem. Although the standard diarization systems can achieve satisfactory results in various scenarios, they are composed of several independently-optimized modules and cannot deal with the overlapped speech. In this paper, we propose a novel speaker diarization method: Region Proposal Network based Speaker Diarization (RPNSD). In this method, a neural network generates overlapped speech segment proposals, and compute their speaker embeddings at the same time. Compa…
Center for Language and Speech Processing, Johns Hopkins University（约翰霍普金斯大学语言与语音处理中心）
In this paper, we present a conditional multitask learning method for end-to-end neural speaker diarization (EEND). The EEND system has shown promising performance compared with traditional clustering-based methods, especially in the case of overlapping speech. In this paper, to further improve the performance of the EEND system, we propose a novel multitask learning framework that solves speaker diarization and a desired subtask while explicitly considering the task dependency. We optimize speaker diarization conditioned on speech activity and overlap detection that are subtasks of speaker di…
Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture（北京建筑大学）
This paper describes the BUCEA speaker diarization system for the 2022 VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge. Voxsrc-22 provides the development set and test set of VoxConverse, and we mainly use the test set of VoxConverse for parameter adjustment. Our system consists of several modules, including speech activity detection (VAD), speaker embedding extractor, clustering methods, overlapping speech detection (OSD), and result fusion. Without considering overlap, the Dover-LAP (short for Diarization Output Voting Error Reduction) method was applied to system fusion, and overlapping speech detec…
This paper describes the Microsoft speaker diarization system for monaural multi-talker recordings in the wild, evaluated at the diarization track of the VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge(VoxSRC) 2020. We will first explain our system design to address issues in handling real multi-talker recordings. We then present the details of the components, which include Res2Net-based speaker embedding extractor, conformer-based continuous speech separation with leakage filtering, and a modified DOVER (short for Diarization Output Voting Error Reduction) method for system fusion. We evaluate the sys…
This paper describes our speaker diarization system submitted to the Multi-channel Multi-party Meeting Transcription (M2MeT) challenge, where Mandarin meeting data were recorded in multi-channel format for diarization and automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks. In these meeting scenarios, the uncertainty of the speaker number and the high ratio of overlapped speech present great challenges for diarization. Based on the assumption that there is valuable complementary information between acoustic features, spatial-related and speaker-related features, we propose a multi-level feature fusion me…
Speaker embedding has been a fundamental feature for speaker-related tasks such as verification, clustering, and diarization. Traditionally, speaker embeddings are represented as fixed vectors in high-dimensional space. This could lead to biased estimations, especially when handling shorter utterances. In this paper we propose to represent a speaker utterance as "floating" vector whose state is indeterminate without knowing the context. The state of a speaker representation is jointly determined by itself, other speech from the same speaker, as well as other speakers it is being compared to. T…
We introduce pyannote.audio, an open-source toolkit written in Python for speaker diarization. Based on PyTorch machine learning framework, it provides a set of trainable end-to-end neural building blocks that can be combined and jointly optimized to build speaker diarization pipelines. pyannote.audio also comes with pre-trained models covering a wide range of domains for voice activity detection, speaker change detection, overlapped speech detection, and speaker embedding -- reaching state-of-the-art performance for most of them.
Speaker diarization is the process of labeling different speakers in a speech signal. Deep speaker embeddings are generally extracted from short speech segments and clustered to determine the segments belong to same speaker identity. The x-vector, which embeds segment-level speaker characteristics by statistically pooling frame-level representations, is one of the most widely used deep speaker embeddings in speaker diarization. Multi-scale aggregation, which employs multi-scale representations from different layers, has recently successfully been used in short duration speaker verification. In…
In the task of speaker diarization, the number of small-scale meetings accounts for a large proportion. When microphone arrays are employed as a recording device, its spatial information is usually ignored by most researchers. In this paper, inspired by the clustering method combining d-vector and microphone array spatial vector, we proposed a diarization method which using multi-channel microphone arrays for a meeting with no more than 4 speakers. We utilize speech enhancement to preprocess the audio from the microphone array. The Steered-Response Power Phase Transform (SRP-PHAT) algorithm ar…
USED: Universal Speaker Extraction and Diarization
Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学苏瑞福公共卫生学院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
This paper describes the ByteDance speaker diarization system for the fourth track of the VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge 2021 (VoxSRC-21). The VoxSRC-21 provides both the dev set and test set of VoxConverse for use in validation and a standalone test set for evaluation. We first collect the duration and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of all audio and find that the distribution of the VoxConverse's test set and the VoxSRC-21's test set is more closer. Our system consists of voice active detection (VAD), speaker embedding extraction, spectral clustering followed by a re-clustering step base…
We propose a streaming diarization method based on an end-to-end neural diarization (EEND) model, which handles flexible numbers of speakers and overlapping speech. In our previous study, the speaker-tracing buffer (STB) mechanism was proposed to achieve a chunk-wise streaming diarization using a pre-trained EEND model. STB traces the speaker information in previous chunks to map the speakers in a new chunk. However, it only worked with two-speaker recordings. In this paper, we propose an extended STB for flexible numbers of speakers, FLEX-STB. The proposed method uses a zero-padding followed …
Speaker Diarization is the problem of separating speakers in an audio. There could be any number of speakers and final result should state when speaker starts and ends. In this project, we analyze given audio file with 2 channels and 2 speakers (on separate channel). We train Neural Network for learning when a person is speaking. We use different type of Neural Networks specifically, Single Layer Perceptron (SLP), Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Convolution Neural Network (CNN) we achieve $\sim$92\% of accuracy with RNN. The code for this project is available a…
This report describes the submission of the DKU-DukeECE-Lenovo team to the VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge (VoxSRC) 2021 track 4. Our system including a voice activity detection (VAD) model, a speaker embedding model, two clustering-based speaker diarization systems with different similarity measurements, two different overlapped speech detection (OSD) models, and a target-speaker voice activity detection (TS-VAD) model. Our final submission, consisting of 5 independent systems, achieves a DER of 5.07% on the challenge test set.
This paper proposes a novel online speaker diarization algorithm based on a fully supervised self-attention mechanism (SA-EEND). Online diarization inherently presents a speaker's permutation problem due to the possibility to assign speaker regions incorrectly across the recording. To circumvent this inconsistency, we proposed a speaker-tracing buffer mechanism that selects several input frames representing the speaker permutation information from previous chunks and stores them in a buffer. These buffered frames are stacked with the input frames in the current chunk and fed into a self-attent…
This paper describes a spatial-aware speaker diarization system for the multi-channel multi-party meeting. The diarization system obtains direction information of speaker by microphone array. Speaker spatial embedding is generated by xvector and s-vector derived from superdirective beamforming (SDB) which makes the embedding more robust. Specifically, we propose a novel multi-channel sequence-to-sequence neural network architecture named discriminative multi-stream neural network (DMSNet) which consists of attention superdirective beamforming (ASDB) block and Conformer encoder. The proposed AS…
We propose a new speaker diarization system based on a recently introduced unsupervised clustering technique namely, generative adversarial network mixture model (GANMM). The proposed system uses x-vectors as front-end representation. Spectral embedding is used for dimensionality reduction followed by k-means initialization during GANMM pre-training. GANMM performs unsupervised speaker clustering by efficiently capturing complex data distributions. Experimental results on the AMI meeting corpus show that the proposed semi-supervised diarization system matches or exceeds the performance of comp…
Speaker diarization relies on the assumption that speech segments corresponding to a particular speaker are concentrated in a specific region of the speaker space; a region which represents that speaker's identity. These identities are not known a priori, so a clustering algorithm is typically employed, which is traditionally based solely on audio. Under noisy conditions, however, such an approach poses the risk of generating unreliable speaker clusters. In this work we aim to utilize linguistic information as a supplemental modality to identify the various speakers in a more robust way. We ar…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
End-to-end speaker diarization approaches have shown exceptional performance over the traditional modular approaches. To further improve the performance of the end-to-end speaker diarization for real speech recordings, recently works have been proposed which integrate unsupervised clustering algorithms with the end-to-end neural diarization models. However, these methods have a number of drawbacks: 1) The unsupervised clustering algorithms cannot leverage the supervision from the available datasets; 2) The K-means-based unsupervised algorithms that are explored often suffer from the constraint…
Visual Computing Group, Ping An Property & Casualty Insurance Company（平安财产保险股份有限公司视觉计算组）
Speaker diarization is connected to semantic segmentation in computer vision. Inspired from MaskFormer \cite{cheng2021per} which treats semantic segmentation as a set-prediction problem, we propose an end-to-end approach to predict a set of targets consisting of binary masks, vocal activities and speaker vectors. Our model, which we coin \textit{DiFormer}, is mainly based on a speaker encoder and a feature pyramid network (FPN) module to extract multi-scale speaker features which are then fed into a transformer encoder-decoder to predict a set of diarization targets from learned query embeddin…
In this paper, we present a novel speaker diarization system for streaming on-device applications. In this system, we use a transformer transducer to detect the speaker turns, represent each speaker turn by a speaker embedding, then cluster these embeddings with constraints from the detected speaker turns. Compared with conventional clustering-based diarization systems, our system largely reduces the computational cost of clustering due to the sparsity of speaker turns. Unlike other supervised speaker diarization systems which require annotations of time-stamped speaker labels for training, ou…
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA)（中国科学院自动化研究所）
Speaker diarization is an essential step for processing multi-speaker audio. Although an end-to-end neural diarization (EEND) method achieved state-of-the-art performance, it is limited to a fixed number of speakers. In this paper, we solve this fixed number of speaker issue by a novel speaker-wise conditional inference method based on the probabilistic chain rule. In the proposed method, each speaker's speech activity is regarded as a single random variable, and is estimated sequentially conditioned on previously estimated other speakers' speech activities. Similar to other sequence-to-sequen…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；iFlytek Research（科大讯飞研究院）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
We propose a separation guided speaker diarization (SGSD) approach by fully utilizing a complementarity of speech separation and speaker clustering. Since the conventional clustering-based speaker diarization (CSD) approach cannot well handle overlapping speech segments, we investigate, in this study, separation-based speaker diarization (SSD) which inherently has the potential to handle the speaker overlap regions. Our preliminary analysis shows that the state-of-the-art Conv-TasNet based speech separation, which works quite well on the simulation data, is unstable in realistic conversational…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）
This work presents a novel approach for speaker diarization to leverage lexical information provided by automatic speech recognition. We propose a speaker diarization system that can incorporate word-level speaker turn probabilities with speaker embeddings into a speaker clustering process to improve the overall diarization accuracy. To integrate lexical and acoustic information in a comprehensive way during clustering, we introduce an adjacency matrix integration for spectral clustering. Since words and word boundary information for word-level speaker turn probability estimation are provided …
Transformer-based end-to-end neural speaker diarization (EEND) models utilize the multi-head self-attention (SA) mechanism to enable accurate speaker label prediction in overlapped speech regions. In this study, to enhance the training effectiveness of SA-EEND models, we propose the use of auxiliary losses for the SA heads of the transformer layers. Specifically, we assume that the attention weight matrices of an SA layer are redundant if their patterns are similar to those of the identity matrix. We then explicitly constrain such matrices to exhibit specific speaker activity patterns relevant…
SAMOVAR, Telecom SudParis, Institut Polytechnique de Paris（SAMOVAR，巴黎电信学院，巴黎综合理工学院）；Newsbridge
Speaker diarization, or the task of finding "who spoke and when", is now used in almost every speech processing application. Nevertheless, its fairness has not yet been evaluated because there was no protocol to study its biases one by one. In this paper we propose a protocol and a scoring method designed to evaluate speaker diarization fairness. This protocol is applied on a large dataset of spoken utterances and report the performances of speaker diarization depending on the gender, the age, the accent of the speaker and the length of the spoken sentence. Some biases induced by the gender, o…
The most common approach to speaker diarization is clustering of speaker embeddings. However, the clustering-based approach has a number of problems; i.e., (i) it is not optimized to minimize diarization errors directly, (ii) it cannot handle speaker overlaps correctly, and (iii) it has trouble adapting their speaker embedding models to real audio recordings with speaker overlaps. To solve these problems, we propose the End-to-End Neural Diarization (EEND), in which a neural network directly outputs speaker diarization results given a multi-speaker recording. To realize such an end-to-end mode…
End-to-end speaker diarization for an unknown number of speakers is addressed in this paper. Recently proposed end-to-end speaker diarization outperformed conventional clustering-based speaker diarization, but it has one drawback: it is less flexible in terms of the number of speakers. This paper proposes a method for encoder-decoder based attractor calculation (EDA), which first generates a flexible number of attractors from a speech embedding sequence. Then, the generated multiple attractors are multiplied by the speech embedding sequence to produce the same number of speaker activities. The…
Automatic speaker diarization techniques typically involve a two-stage processing approach where audio segments of fixed duration are converted to vector representations in the first stage. This is followed by an unsupervised clustering of the representations in the second stage. In most of the prior approaches, these two stages are performed in an isolated manner with independent optimization steps. In this paper, we propose a representation learning and clustering algorithm that can be iteratively performed for improved speaker diarization. The representation learning is based on principles …
Overlapping speech diarization is always treated as a multi-label classification problem. In this paper, we reformulate this task as a single-label prediction problem by encoding the multi-speaker labels with power set. Specifically, we propose the speaker embedding-aware neural diarization (SEND) method, which predicts the power set encoded labels according to the similarities between speech features and given speaker embeddings. Our method is further extended and integrated with downstream tasks by utilizing the textual information, which has not been well studied in previous literature. The…
This paper describes a method for overlap-aware speaker diarization. Given an overlap detector and a speaker embedding extractor, our method performs spectral clustering of segments informed by the output of the overlap detector. This is achieved by transforming the discrete clustering problem into a convex optimization problem which is solved by eigen-decomposition. Thereafter, we discretize the solution by alternatively using singular value decomposition and a modified version of non-maximal suppression which is constrained by the output of the overlap detector. Furthermore, we detail an HMM…
We propose to address online speaker diarization as a combination of incremental clustering and local diarization applied to a rolling buffer updated every 500ms. Every single step of the proposed pipeline is designed to take full advantage of the strong ability of a recently proposed end-to-end overlap-aware segmentation to detect and separate overlapping speakers. In particular, we propose a modified version of the statistics pooling layer (initially introduced in the x-vector architecture) to give less weight to frames where the segmentation model predicts simultaneous speakers. Furthermore…
This paper presents Transcribe-to-Diarize, a new approach for neural speaker diarization that uses an end-to-end (E2E) speaker-attributed automatic speech recognition (SA-ASR). The E2E SA-ASR is a joint model that was recently proposed for speaker counting, multi-talker speech recognition, and speaker identification from monaural audio that contains overlapping speech. Although the E2E SA-ASR model originally does not estimate any time-related information, we show that the start and end times of each word can be estimated with sufficient accuracy from the internal state of the E2E SA-ASR by ad…
Speaker diarization is one of the critical components of computational media intelligence as it enables a character-level analysis of story portrayals and media content understanding. Automated audio-based speaker diarization of entertainment media poses challenges due to the diverse acoustic conditions present in media content, be it background music, overlapping speakers, or sound effects. At the same time, speaking faces in the visual modality provide complementary information and not prone to the errors seen in the audio modality. In this paper, we address the problem of speaker diarizatio…
