Sequential organization of speech in computational auditory scene analysis

A human listener has the ability to follow a speaker's voice over time in the presence of other talkers and non-speech interference. This paper proposes a general system for sequential organization of speech based on speaker models. By training a general background model, the proposed system is shown to function well with both interfering talkers and non-speech intrusions. To deal with situations where prior information about specific speakers is not available, a speaker quantization method is employed to extract representative models from a large speaker space and obtained generic models are used to perform sequential grouping. Our systematic evaluations show that grouping performance using generic models is only moderately lower than the performance level achieved with known speaker models. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.