This paper presents the Speech Technology Center (STC) speaker recognition
(SR) systems submitted to the VOiCES From a Distance challenge 2019.
The challenge’s SR task is focused on the problem of speaker
recognition in single channel distant/far-field audio under noisy conditions.
In this work we investigate different deep neural networks architectures
for speaker embedding extraction to solve the task. We show that deep
networks with residual frame level connections outperform more shallow
architectures. Simple energy based speech activity detector (SAD) and
automatic speech recognition (ASR) based SAD are investigated in this
work. We also address the problem of data preparation for robust embedding
extractors training. The reverberation for the data augmentation was
performed using automatic room impulse response generator. In our systems
we used discriminatively trained cosine similarity metric learning
model as embedding backend. Scores normalization procedure was applied
for each individual subsystem we used. Our final submitted systems
were based on the fusion of different subsystems. The results obtained
on the VOiCES development and evaluation sets demonstrate effectiveness
and robustness of the proposed systems when dealing with distant/far-field
audio under noisy conditions.
This paper also appears
in session Wed-SS-7-3.