Experiments on distant-talking speaker verification in TV scenario

In this work text-independent speaker verification (SV) in a distant-talking noisy scenario is addressed: users can interact with a TV-system able to understand vocal commands and verify simultaneously the identity of the speaker. The main issues with SV under this scenario are related to reverberation, interfering sound sources (TV output) and usually very short utterances; as a consequence, an increasing confusability among speakers models can be observed. To partially cope with this, we propose a system that exploits the processing of signals acquired by a microphone array and a phonetic class segmentation in unsupervised modality. Comparing the proposed system with a GMM-UBM based system we demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach on data acquired with a real prototype.