Speaker change detection using fundamental frequency with application to multi-talker segmentation
Author(s)
Hogg, Aidan
Naylor, Patrick
Evers, Christine
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
This paper shows that time varying pitch properties can be used advantageously within the segmentation step of a multi-talker diarization system. First a study is conducted to verify that changes in pitch are strong indicators of changes in the speaker. It is then highlighted that an individual’s pitch is smoothly varying and, therefore, can be predicted by means of a Kalman filter. Subsequently it is shown that if the pitch is not predictable then this is most likely due to a change in the speaker. Finally, a novel system is proposed that uses this approach of pitch prediction for speaker change detection. This system is then evaluated against a commonly used MFCC segmentation system. The proposed system is shown to increase the speaker change detection rate from 43.3% to 70.5% on meetings in the AMI corpus. Therefore, there are two equally weighted contributions in this paper: 1. We address the question of whether a change in pitch is a reliable estimator of a speaker change in multi-talk meeting audio. 2. We develop a method to extract such speaker changes and test them on a widely available meeting corpus.
Date Issued
2019-04-17
Date Acceptance
2019-02-01
Citation
2019
Publisher
IEEE
Copyright Statement
© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Sponsor
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (E
Identifier
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8682924
Grant Number
EP/P001017/1
Source
IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Acoustics
Engineering, Electrical & Electronic
Engineering
speaker segmentation
pitch tracking
Kalman filter
DIARIZATION
RECOGNITION
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2019-05-12
Finish Date
2019-05-17
Coverage Spatial
Brighton, UK
Date Publish Online
2019-04-17