RSKNet-MTSP: Effective and Portable Deep Architecture for Speaker Verification
This work improves speaker verification accuracy for applications like biometric security, though it appears incremental with novel components building on existing CNN approaches.
The paper tackles speaker verification by proposing RSKNet-MTSP, a CNN-based architecture that addresses challenges in modeling long temporal context and reducing information loss, achieving at least 9%-26% improvement over state-of-the-art methods on VoxCeleb and SITW datasets.
The convolutional neural network (CNN) based approaches have shown great success for speaker verification (SV) tasks, where modeling long temporal context and reducing information loss of speaker characteristics are two important challenges significantly affecting the verification performance. Previous works have introduced dilated convolution and multi-scale aggregation methods to address above challenges. However, such methods are also hard to make full use of some valuable information, which make it difficult to substantially improve the verification performance. To address above issues, we construct a novel CNN-based architecture for SV, called RSKNet-MTSP, where a residual selective kernel block (RSKBlock) and a multiple time-scale statistics pooling (MTSP) module are first proposed. The RSKNet-MTSP can capture both long temporal context and neighbouring information, and gather more speaker-discriminative information from multi-scale features. In order to design a portable model for real applications with limited resources, we then present a lightweight version of RSKNet-MTSP, namely RSKNet-MTSP-L, which employs a combination technique associating the depthwise separable convolutions with low-rank factorization of weight matrices. Extensive experiments are conducted on two public SV datasets, VoxCeleb and Speaker in the Wild (SITW). The results demonstrate that 1) RSKNet-MTSP outperforms the state-of-the-art deep embedding architectures by at least 9%-26% in all test sets. 2) RSKNet-MTSP-L achieves competitive performance compared with baseline models with 17%-39% less network parameters. The ablation experiments further illustrate that our proposed approaches can achieve substantial improvement over prior methods.