INTERSPEECH 2011 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Florence, Italy August 27-31. 2011

Analysis of i-vector Length Normalization in Speaker Recognition Systems

Daniel Garcia-Romero, Carol Y. Espy-Wilson

University of Maryland at College Park, USA

We present a method to boost the performance of probabilistic generative models that work with i-vector representations. The proposed approach deals with the non- Gaussian behavior of i-vectors by performing a simple length normalization. This nonlinear transformation allows the use of probabilistic models with Gaussian assumptions that yield equivalent performance to that of more complicated systems based on Heavy-Tailed assumptions. Significant performance improvements are demonstrated on the telephone portion of NIST SRE 2010.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Garcia-Romero, Daniel / Espy-Wilson, Carol Y. (2011): "Analysis of i-vector length normalization in speaker recognition systems", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 249-252.