Blind Spectral Weighting for Robust Speaker Identification under Reverberation Mismatch

Room reverberation poses various deleterious effects on performance of automatic speech systems. Speaker identification (SID) performance, in particular, degrades rapidly as reverberation time increases. Reverberation causes two forms of spectro-temporal distortions on speech signals: i) self-masking which is due to early reflections and ii) overlap-masking which is due to late reverberation. Overlap-masking effect of reverberation has been shown to have a greater adverse impact on performance of speech systems. Motivated by this fact, this study proposes a blind spectral weighting (BSW) technique for suppressing the reverberation overlap-masking effect on SID systems. The technique is blind in the sense that prior knowledge of neither the anechoic signal nor the room impulse response is required. Performance of the proposed technique is evaluated on speaker verification tasks under simulated and actual reverberant mismatched conditions. Evaluations are conducted in the context of the conventional GMM-UBM as well as the state-of-the-art i-vector based systems. The GMM-UBM experiments are performed using speech material from a new data corpus well suited for speaker verification experiments under actual reverberant mismatched conditions, entitled MultiRoom8. The i-vector experiments are carried out with microphone (interview and phonecall) data from the NIST SRE 2010 extended evaluation set which are digitally convolved with three different measured room impulse responses extracted from the Aachen impulse response (AIR) database. Experimental results prove that incorporating the proposed blind technique into the standard MFCC feature extraction framework yields significant improvement in SID performance under reverberation mismatch.