Bidirectional Attention for Text-Dependent Speaker Verification

Automatic speaker verification provides a flexible and effective way for biometric authentication. Previous deep learning-based methods have demonstrated promising results, whereas a few problems still require better solutions. In prior works examining speaker discriminative neural networks, the speaker representation of the target speaker is regarded as a fixed one when comparing with utterances from different speakers, and the joint information between enrollment and evaluation utterances is ignored. In this paper, we propose to combine CNN-based feature learning with a bidirectional attention mechanism to achieve better performance with only one enrollment utterance. The evaluation-enrollment joint information is exploited to provide interactive features through bidirectional attention. In addition, we introduce one individual cost function to identify the phonetic contents, which contributes to calculating the attention score more specifically. These interactive features are complementary to the constant ones, which are extracted from individual speakers separately and do not vary with the evaluation utterances. The proposed method archived a competitive equal error rate of 6.26% on the internal “DAN DAN NI HAO” benchmark dataset with 1250 utterances and outperformed various baseline methods, including the traditional i-vector/PLDA, d-vector, self-attention, and sequence-to-sequence attention models.