A deep learning approach has been proposed recently to derive speaker identifies (d-vector) by a deep neural network (DNN). This approach has been applied to text-dependent speaker recognition tasks and shows reasonable performance gains when combined with the conventional i-vector approach. Although promising, the existing d-vector implementation still can not compete with the i-vector baseline. This paper presents two improvements for the deep learning approach: a phonedependent DNN structure to normalize phone variation, and a new scoring approach based on dynamic time warping (DTW). Experiments on a text-dependent speaker recognition task demonstrated that the proposed methods can provide considerable performance improvement over the existing d-vector implementation.
In this paper we investigate the use of deep neural networks (DNNs) for a small footprint text-dependent speaker verification task. At development stage, a DNN is trained to classify speakers at the frame-level. During speaker enrollment, the trained DNN is used to extract speaker specific features from the last hidden layer. The average of these speaker features, or d-vector, is taken as the speaker model. At evaluation stage, a d-vector is extracted for each utterance and compared to the enrolled speaker model to make a verification decision. Experimental results show the DNN based speaker verification system achieves good performance compared to a popular i-vector system on a small footprint text-dependent speaker verification task. In addition, the DNN based system is more robust to additive noise and outperforms the i-vector system at low False Rejection operating points. Finally the combined system outperforms the i-vector system by 14 and 25 relative in equal error rate (EER) for clean and noisy conditions respectively.