Acoustic Beamforming for Speaker Diarization of Meetings

When performing speaker diarization on recordings from meetings, multiple microphones of different qualities are usually available and distributed around the meeting room. Although several approaches have been proposed in recent years to take advantage of multiple microphones, they are either too co...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on audio, speech, and language processing speech, and language processing, 2007-09, Vol.15 (7), p.2011-2022
Main Authors: Anguera, X., Wooters, C., Hernando, J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic beamforming
Acoustic testing
Ambient intelligence
Array signal processing
Associate members
Computer science
Loudspeakers
meeting processing
Meetings
Microphone arrays
Signal processing
speaker diarization
speaker segmentation and clustering
Speech
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Summary:When performing speaker diarization on recordings from meetings, multiple microphones of different qualities are usually available and distributed around the meeting room. Although several approaches have been proposed in recent years to take advantage of multiple microphones, they are either too computationally expensive and not easily scalable or they cannot outperform the simpler case of using the best single microphone. In this paper, the use of classic acoustic beamforming techniques is proposed together with several novel algorithms to create a complete frontend for speaker diarization in the meeting room domain. New techniques we are presenting include blind reference-channel selection, two-step time delay of arrival (TDOA) Viterbi postprocessing, and a dynamic output signal weighting algorithm, together with using such TDOA values in the diarization to complement the acoustic information. Tests on speaker diarization show a 25% relative improvement on the test set compared to using a single most centrally located microphone. Additional experimental results show improvements using these techniques in a speech recognition task.
ISSN:1558-7916
2329-9290
1558-7924
2329-9304
DOI:10.1109/TASL.2007.902460