A System for Speaker Detection and Tracking in Audio Broadcast News

A system for speaker-based audio-indexing and an application for speaker-tracking in broadcast news audio are presented. The process of producing an indexing information in continuous audio streams based on detected speakers is composed of several tasks and is therefore treated as a multistage process. The main building blocks of such an indexing system include components for an audio segmentation, a speech detection, a speaker clustering and a speaker identification. We give an overview of each component of the system with emphasis to the approaches that are followed in each stage of building of our speakerdiarization and tracking system. The proposed system is evaluated on the audio data from the broadcast news domain, whereas we test each of the system’s component and measure their impacts to the overall system’s performance. The evaluation results indicate the importance of an audio segmentation and a speech detection module to the reliable performance of the whole system. Based on an indexing information produced by our system we also developed an application for searching target speakers in broadcast news. The application is designed in a way to be user-friendly and can be easily integrated in various computer environments.