Technical Program

Paper Detail

Presentation #4
Session:Speaker Recognition/Verification
Location:Kallirhoe Hall
Session Time:Thursday, December 20, 10:00 - 12:00
Presentation Time:Thursday, December 20, 10:00 - 12:00
Presentation: Poster
Topic: Speaker/language recognition:
Paper Title: SPEAKER RECOGNITION FROM RAW WAVEFORM WITH SINCNET
Authors: Mirco Ravanelli, Yoshua Bengio, Université de Montréal, Canada
Abstract: Deep learning is progressively gaining popularity as a viable alternative to i-vectors for speaker recognition. Promising results have been recently obtained with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) when fed by raw speech samples directly. Rather than employing standard hand-crafted features, the latter CNNs learn low-level speech representations from waveforms, potentially allowing the network to better capture important narrow-band speaker characteristics such as pitch and formants. Proper design of the neural network is crucial to achieve this goal. This paper proposes a novel CNN architecture, called SincNet, that encourages the first convolutional layer to discover more meaningful filters. SincNet is based on parametrized sinc functions, which implement band-pass filters. In contrast to standard CNNs, that learn all elements of each filter, only low and high cutoff frequencies are directly learned from data with the proposed method. This offers a very compact and efficient way to derive a customized filter bank specifically tuned for the desired application. Our experiments, conducted on both speaker identification and speaker verification tasks, show that the proposed architecture converges faster and performs better than a standard CNN on raw waveforms.