Towards end-to-end Speaker Diarization with Generalized Neural Speaker Clustering

Speaker diarization consists of many components, e.g., front-end processing, speech activity detection (SAD), overlapped speech detection (OSD) and speaker segmentation/clustering. Conventionally, most of the involved components are separately developed and optimized. The resulting speaker diarization systems are complicated and sometimes lack of satisfying generalization capabilities. In this study, we present a novel speaker diarization system, with a generalized neural speaker clustering module as the backbone. The whole system can be simplified to contain only two major parts, a speaker embedding extractor followed by a clustering module. Both parts are implemented with neural networks. In the training phase, an on-the-fly spoken dialogue generator is designed to provide the system with audio streams and the corresponding annotations in categories of non-speech, overlapped speech and active speakers. The chunk-wise inference and a speaker verification based tracing module are conducted to handle the arbitrary number of speakers. We demonstrate that the proposed speaker diarization system is able to integrate SAD, OSD and speaker segmentation/clustering, and yield competitive results in the VoxConverse20 benchmarks.