This paper provides a detailed description of the Hitachi-JHU system that was submitted to the Third DIHARD Speech Diarization Challenge. The system outputs the ensemble results of the five subsystems: two x-vector-based subsystems, two end-to-end neural diarization-based subsystems, and one hybrid subsystem. We refine each system and all five subsystems become competitive and complementary. After the DOVER-Lap based system combination, it achieved diarization error rates of 11.58 % and 14.09 % in Track 1 full and core, and 16.94 % and 20.01 % in Track 2 full and core, respectively. With their results, we won second place in all the tasks of the challenge.
This paper proposes an online end-to-end diarization that can handle overlapping speech and flexible numbers of speakers. The end-to-end neural speaker diarization (EEND) model has already achieved significant improvement when compared with conventional clustering-based methods. However, the original EEND has two limitations: i) EEND does not perform well in online scenarios; ii) the number of speakers must be fixed in advance. This paper solves both problems by applying a modified extension of the speaker-tracing buffer method that deals with variable numbers of speakers. Experiments on CALLHOME and DIHARD II datasets show that the proposed online method achieves comparable performance to the offline EEND method. Compared with the state-of-the-art online method based on a fully supervised approach (UIS-RNN), the proposed method shows better performance on the DIHARD II dataset.
This paper investigates the utilization of an end-to-end diarization model as post-processing of conventional clustering-based diarization. Clustering-based diarization methods partition frames into clusters of the number of speakers; thus, they typically cannot handle overlapping speech because each frame is assigned to one speaker. On the other hand, some end-to-end diarization methods can handle overlapping speech by treating the problem as multi-label classification. Although some methods can treat a flexible number of speakers, they do not perform well when the number of speakers is large. To compensate for each other's weakness, we propose to use a two-speaker end-to-end diarization method as post-processing of the results obtained by a clustering-based method. We iteratively select two speakers from the results and update the results of the two speakers to improve the overlapped region. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm consistently improved the performance of the state-of-the-art methods across CALLHOME, AMI, and DIHARD II datasets.