Ondrej Novotny

Ondrej Novotny, Oldrich Plchot, Ondrej Glembek et al.

In this work, we continue in our research on i-vector extractor for speaker verification (SV) and we optimize its architecture for fast and effective discriminative training. We were motivated by computational and memory requirements caused by the large number of parameters of the original generative i-vector model. Our aim is to preserve the power of the original generative model, and at the same time focus the model towards extraction of speaker-related information. We show that it is possible to represent a standard generative i-vector extractor by a model with significantly less parameters and obtain similar performance on SV tasks. We can further refine this compact model by discriminative training and obtain i-vectors that lead to better performance on various SV benchmarks representing different acoustic domains.

Ondrej Novotny, Oldrich Plchot, Ondrej Glembek et al.

In this work, we present an analysis of a DNN-based autoencoder for speech enhancement, dereverberation and denoising. The target application is a robust speaker verification (SV) system. We start our approach by carefully designing a data augmentation process to cover wide range of acoustic conditions and obtain rich training data for various components of our SV system. We augment several well-known databases used in SV with artificially noised and reverberated data and we use them to train a denoising autoencoder (mapping noisy and reverberated speech to its clean version) as well as an x-vector extractor which is currently considered as state-of-the-art in SV. Later, we use the autoencoder as a preprocessing step for text-independent SV system. We compare results achieved with autoencoder enhancement, multi-condition PLDA training and their simultaneous use. We present a detailed analysis with various conditions of NIST SRE 2010, 2016, PRISM and with re-transmitted data. We conclude that the proposed preprocessing can significantly improve both i-vector and x-vector baselines and that this technique can be used to build a robust SV system for various target domains.

Ondrej Novotny, Oldrich Plchot, Pavel Matejka et al.

In this paper, we present an analysis of a DNN-based autoencoder for speech enhancement, dereverberation and denoising. The target application is a robust speaker recognition system. We started with augmenting the Fisher database with artificially noised and reverberated data and we trained the autoencoder to map noisy and reverberated speech to its clean version. We use the autoencoder as a preprocessing step for a state-of-the-art text-independent speaker recognition system. We compare results achieved with pure autoencoder enhancement, multi-condition PLDA training and their simultaneous use. We present a detailed analysis with various conditions of NIST SRE 2010, PRISM and artificially corrupted NIST SRE 2010 telephone condition. We conclude that the proposed preprocessing significantly outperforms the baseline and that this technique can be used to build a robust speaker recognition system for reverberated and noisy data.

Ondrej Novotny, Oldrich Plchot, Ondrej Glembek et al.

In this work we revisit discriminative training of the i-vector extractor component in the standard speaker verification (SV) system. The motivation of our research lies in the robustness and stability of this large generative model, which we want to preserve, and focus its power towards any intended SV task. We show that after generative initialization of the i-vector extractor, we can further refine it with discriminative training and obtain i-vectors that lead to better performance on various benchmarks representing different acoustic domains.