Online Neural Diarization of Unlimited Numbers of Speakers Using Global and Local Attractors
This addresses the limitation in existing speaker diarization methods that cannot scale to unseen numbers of speakers, which is crucial for real-world applications like meeting transcription and surveillance.
The paper tackles the problem of speaker diarization for an unlimited number of speakers by introducing EEND-GLA, a method that combines attractor-based end-to-end neural diarization with unsupervised clustering, enabling it to handle more speakers during inference than in training and achieving performance in both offline and online settings.
A method to perform offline and online speaker diarization for an unlimited number of speakers is described in this paper. End-to-end neural diarization (EEND) has achieved overlap-aware speaker diarization by formulating it as a multi-label classification problem. It has also been extended for a flexible number of speakers by introducing speaker-wise attractors. However, the output number of speakers of attractor-based EEND is empirically capped; it cannot deal with cases where the number of speakers appearing during inference is higher than that during training because its speaker counting is trained in a fully supervised manner. Our method, EEND-GLA, solves this problem by introducing unsupervised clustering into attractor-based EEND. In the method, the input audio is first divided into short blocks, then attractor-based diarization is performed for each block, and finally, the results of each block are clustered on the basis of the similarity between locally-calculated attractors. While the number of output speakers is limited within each block, the total number of speakers estimated for the entire input can be higher than the limitation. To use EEND-GLA in an online manner, our method also extends the speaker-tracing buffer, which was originally proposed to enable online inference of conventional EEND. We introduce a block-wise buffer update to make the speaker-tracing buffer compatible with EEND-GLA. Finally, to improve online diarization, our method improves the buffer update method and revisits the variable chunk-size training of EEND. The experimental results demonstrate that EEND-GLA can perform speaker diarization of an unseen number of speakers in both offline and online inferences.