A comparative study of spectral clustering for i-vector-based speaker clustering under noisy conditions

The present paper dealt with speaker clustering for speech corrupted by noise. In general, the performance of speaker clustering significantly depends on how well the similarities between speech utterances can be measured. The recently proposed i-vector-based cosine similarity has yielded the state-of-the-art performance in speaker clustering systems. However, this similarity often fails to capture the speaker similarity under noisy conditions. Therefore, we attempted to examine the efficiency of spectral clustering on i-vector-based similarity for speech corrupted by noise because spectral clustering can yield robustness against noise by non-linear projection. Experimental comparisons demonstrated that spectral clustering yielded significant improvement from conventional methods, such as agglomerative clustering and k-means clustering, under non-stationary noise conditions.