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Despite successful applications of multi-channel signal processing in robust automatic speech recognition (ASR), relatively little research has been conducted on the effectiveness of such techniques in the robust speaker recognition domain. This paper introduces time-frequency (T-F) maskingbased beamforming to address text-independent speaker recognition in conditions where strong diffuse noise and reverberation are both present. We examine various masking-based beamformers, such as parameterized multi-channel Wiener filter, generalized eigenvalue (GEV) beamformer and minimum variance distortion-less response (MVDR) beamformer, and evaluate their performance in terms of speaker recognition accuracy for i-vector and x-vector based systems. In addition, we present a different formulation for estimating steering vectors from speech covariance matrices. We show that rank-1 approximation of a speech covariance matrix based on generalized eigenvalue decomposition leads to the best results for the masking-based MVDR beamformer. Experiments on the recently introduced NIST SRE 2010 retransmitted corpus show that the MVDR beamformer with rank-1 approximation provides an absolute reduction of 5.55% in equal error rate compared to a standard masking-based MVDR beamformer.

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The practical efficacy of deep learning based speaker separation and/or dereverberation hinges on its ability to generalize to conditions not employed during neural network training. The current study was designed to assess the ability to generalize across extremely different training versus test environments. Training and testing were performed using different languages having no known common ancestry and correspondingly large linguistic differences—English for training and Mandarin for testing. Additional generalizations included untrained speech corpus/recording channel, target-to-interferer energy ratios, reverberation room impulse responses, and test talkers. A deep computational auditory scene analysis algorithm, employing complex time-frequency masking to estimate both magnitude and phase, was used to segregate two concurrent talkers and simultaneously remove large amounts of room reverberation to increase the intelligibility of a target talker. Significant intelligibility improvements were observed for the normal-hearing listeners in every condition. Benefit averaged 43.5% points across conditions and was comparable to that obtained when training and testing were performed both in English. Benefit is projected to be considerably larger for individuals with hearing impairment. It is concluded that a properly designed and trained deep speaker separation/dereverberation network can be capable of generalization across vastly different acoustic environments that include different languages.