Analysis of Deep Generative Model Impact on Feature Extraction and Dimension Reduction for Short Utterance Text-Independent Speaker Verification

Abstract

Speaker verification is a biometric-based method for individual authentication. However, there are still several challenging problems in achieving high performance in short utterance text-independent conditions, maybe for weak speaker-specific features. Recently, deep learning algorithms have been used extensively in speech processing. This manuscript uses a deep belief network (DBN) as a deep generative method for feature extraction in speaker verification systems. This study aims to show the impact of using the proposed method in various challenging issues, including short utterances, text independence, language variation, and large-scale speaker verification. The proposed DBN uses MFCC as input and tries to extract more efficient features. This new representation of speaker information is evaluated in two popular speaker verification systems: GMM-UBM and i-vector-PLDA methods. The results show that, for the i-vector-PLDA system, the proposed feature decreases the EER considerably from 15.24 to 10.97%. In another experiment, DBN is used to reduce feature dimension and achieves significant results in decreasing computational time and increasing system response speed. In a case study, all the evaluations are performed for 1270 speakers of the NIST SRE2008 dataset. We show deep belief networks can be used in state-of-the-art acoustic modeling methods and more challenging datasets.