Learning robust speaker embeddings is a crucial step in speaker diarization.
Deep neural networks can accurately capture speaker discriminative
characteristics and popular deep embeddings such as x-vectors are nowadays
a fundamental component of modern diarization systems. Recently, some
improvements over the standard TDNN architecture used for x-vectors
have been proposed. The ECAPA-TDNN model, for instance, has shown impressive
performance in the speaker verification domain, thanks to a carefully
designed neural model.
In this work, we extend,
for the first time, the use of the ECAPA-TDNN model to speaker diarization.
Moreover, we improved its robustness with a powerful augmentation scheme
that concatenates several contaminated versions of the same signal
within the same training batch. The ECAPA-TDNN model turned out to
provide robust speaker embeddings under both close-talking and distant-talking
conditions. Our results on the popular AMI meeting corpus show that
our system significantly outperforms recently proposed approaches.