Large-scale speaker identification

Speaker identification is one of the main tasks in speech processing. In addition to identification accuracy, large-scale applications of speaker identification give rise to another challenge: fast search in the database of speakers. In this paper, we propose a system based on i-vectors, a current approach for speaker identification, and locality sensitive hashing, an algorithm for fast nearest neighbor search in high dimensions. The connection between the two techniques is the cosine distance: on the one hand, we use the cosine distance to compare i-vectors, on the other hand, locality sensitive hashing allows us to quickly approximate the cosine distance in our retrieval procedure. We evaluate our approach on a realistic data set from YouTube with about 1,000 speakers. The results show that our algorithm is approximately one to two orders of magnitude faster than a linear search while maintaining the identification accuracy of an i-vector-based system.