A Comparative Assessment of Text-independent Automatic Speaker Identification Methods Using Limited Data

Abstract

Automatic Speaker Identification (ASI) is one of the active fields of research in signal processing. Various machine learning algorithms have been used for this purpose. With the recent developments in hardware technologies and data accumulation, Deep Learning (DL) methods have become the new state-of-the-art approach in several classification and identification tasks. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of traditional methods such as Gaussian Mixture Model-Universal Background Model (GMM-UBM) and DL-based techniques such as Factorized Time-Delay Neural Network (FTDNN) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for text-independent closed-set automatic speaker identification on two datasets with different conditions. LibriSpeech is one of the experimental datasets, which consists of clean audio signals from audiobooks, collected from a large number of speakers. The other dataset was collected and prepared by us, which has rather limited speech data with low signal-to-noise-ratio from real-life conversations of customers with the agents in a call center. The duration of the speech signals in the query phase is an important factor affecting the performances of ASI methods. In this work, a CNN architecture is proposed for automatic speaker identification from short speech segments. The architecture design aims at capturing the temporal nature of speech signal in an optimum convolutional neural network with low number of parameters compared to the well-known CNN architectures. We show that the proposed CNN-based algorithm performs better on the large and clean dataset, whereas on the other dataset with limited amount of data, traditional method outperforms all DL approaches. The achieved top-1 accuracy by the proposed model is 99.5% on 1-second voice instances from LibriSpeech dataset.