FDN: Finite Difference Network with Hierarchical Convolutional Features for Text-independent Speaker Verification

Abstract: In recent years, using raw waveforms as input for deep networks has been widely explored for the speaker verification system. For example, RawNet and RawNet2 extracted speaker's feature embeddings from waveforms automatically for recognizing their voice, which can vastly reduce the front-end computation and obtain state-of-the-art performance. However, these models do not consider the speaker's high-level behavioral features, such as intonation, indicating each speaker's universal style, rhythm, \textit{etc}. This paper presents a novel network that can handle the intonation information by computing the finite difference of different speakers' utterance variations. Furthermore, a hierarchical way is also designed to enhance the intonation property from coarse to fine to improve the system accuracy. The high-level intonation features are then fused with the low-level embedding features. Experimental results on official VoxCeleb1 test data, VoxCeleb1-E, and VoxCeleb-H protocols show our method outperforms and robustness existing state-of-the-art systems. To facilitate further research, code is available at https://github.com/happyjin/FDN