Improved speaker diarization system for meetings

In this paper, we investigate new approaches to improve speech activity detection, speaker segmentation and speaker clustering. The main idea behind them is to deal with the problem of speaker diarization for meetings where error rates are relatively high. In opposition to existing methods, a new iterative scheme is proposed considering those three tasks as only one problem. New bidirectional source segmentation is proposed based on the GLR/BIC method. The well-known BIC clustering is also reviewed and a new unsupervised post-processing is added to increase clusters purity. Those new proposals applied on meeting data show a relative improvement of about 40% compared to a standard speaker diarization system.