Using audio and visual cues for speaker diarisation initialisation

In this paper we present a novel approach to audio visual speaker diarisation (the task of estimating “who spoke when” using audio and visual cues) in a challenging meeting domain. Our approach is based on the initialisation of the agglomerative speaker clustering using psychology inspired visual features, including Visual Focus of Attention (VFoA) and motion intensities. This method, providing initial speaker clusters of high purity, achieved consistent improvements over the widely adopted linear initialisation method. Moreover, the initialisation using both visual and Time Delay of Arrival (TDoA) cues was also investigated in conjunction with the multi-stream combination of acoustic and visual features (MFCC, TDoA, VFoA, motion intensity, and head pose likelihoods). This speaker diarisation framework allowed to successfully integrate three feature streams, further exploiting the complementarity between multimodal cues.