Speaker Verification in Multi-Speaker Environments Using Temporal Feature Fusion

Verifying the identity of a speaker is crucial in modern human-machine interfaces, e.g., to ensure privacy protection or to enable biometric authentication. Classical speaker verification (SV) approaches estimate a fixed-dimensional embedding from a speech utterance that encodes the speaker's voice characteristics. A speaker is verified if his/her voice embedding is sufficiently similar to the embedding of the claimed speaker. However, such approaches assume that only a single speaker exists in the input. The presence of concurrent speakers is likely to have detrimental effects on the performance. To address SV in a multi-speaker environment, we propose an end-to-end deep learning-based SV system that detects whether the target speaker exists within an input or not. First, an embedding is estimated from a reference utterance to represent the target's characteristics. Second, frame-level features are estimated from the input mixture. The reference embedding is then fused frame-wise with the mixture's features to allow distinguishing the target from other speakers on a frame basis. Finally, the fused features are used to predict whether the target speaker is active in the speech segment or not. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed method outperforms the x-vector in multi-speaker conditions.