BIC-Based Speaker Segmentation Using Divide-and-Conquer Strategies With Application to Speaker Diarization

In this paper, we propose three divide-and-conquer approaches for Bayesian information criterion (BIC)-based speaker segmentation. The approaches detect speaker changes by recursively partitioning a large analysis window into two sub-windows and recursively verifying the merging of two adjacent audio segments using Delta BIC, a widely-adopted distance measure of two audio segments. We compare our approaches to three popular distance-based approaches, namely, Chen and Gopalakrishnan's window-growing-based approach, Siegler et al.'s fixed-size sliding window approach, and Delacourt and Wellekens's DISTBIC approach, by performing computational cost analysis and conducting speaker change detection experiments on two broadcast news data sets. The results show that the proposed approaches are more efficient and achieve higher segmentation accuracy than the compared distance-based approaches. In addition, we apply the segmentation approaches discussed in this paper to the speaker diarization task. The experiment results show that a more effective segmentation approach leads to better diarization accuracy.