Polynomial Eigenvalue Decomposition-Based Target Speaker Voice Activity Detection in the Presence of Competing Talkers

Vincent W. Neo, Stephan Weiss, Simon W. McKnight, Aidan O. T. Hogg, Patrick A. Naylor

Abstract: Voice activity detection (VAD) algorithms are essential for many speech processing applications, such as speaker diarization, automatic speech recognition, speech enhancement, and speech coding. With a good VAD algorithm, non-speech segments can be excluded to improve the performance and computation of these applications. In this paper, we propose a polynomial eigenvalue decomposition-based target-speaker VAD algorithm to detect unseen target speakers in the presence of competing talkers. The proposed approach uses frame-based processing across multi-microphones to compute the syndrome energy, used for testing the presence or absence of a target speaker. The proposed approach is consistently among the best in F1 and balanced accuracy scores over the investigated range of signal to interference ratio (SIR) from -10 dB to 20 dB.