Memory-aware i-vector extraction by means of sub-space factorization

Abstract

Most of the state-of-the-art speaker recognition systems use i-vectors, a compact representation of spoken utterances. Since the “standard” i-vector extraction procedure requires large memory structures, we recently presented the Factorized Sub-space Estimation (FSE) approach, an efficient technique that dramatically reduces the memory needs for i-vector extraction, and is also fast and accurate compared to other proposed approaches. FSE is based on the approximation of the matrix T, representing the speaker variability sub-space, by means of the product of appropriately designed matrices. In this work, we introduce and evaluate a further approximation of the matrices that most contribute to the memory costs in the FSE approach, showing that it is possible to obtain comparable system accuracy using less than a half of FSE memory, which corresponds to more than 60 times memory reduction with respect to the standard method of i-vector extraction.