Group-based speaker embeddings for text-independent speaker verification

Abstract

Recently, deep speaker embedding approach has been widely used in text-independent speaker verification, which shows better performance than the traditional i-vector approach. In this work, to improve the deep speaker embedding approach, we propose a novel method called group-based speaker embedding which incorporates group information. We cluster all speakers of the training data into a predefined number of groups in an unsupervised manner, so that a fixed-length group embedding represents the corresponding group. A Group Decision Network (GDN) produces a group weight, and an aggregated group embedding is generated from the weighted sum of the group embeddings and the group weights. Finally, we generate a group-based embedding by adding the aggregated group embedding to the deep speaker embedding. In this way, a speaker embedding can reduce the search space of the speaker identity by incorporating group information, and thereby can flexibly represent a significant number of speakers. We conducted experiments using the VoxCeleb1 database to show that our proposed approach can improve the previous approaches.