Papers › X-Vector based voice activity detection for multi-genre broadcast speech-to-text

X-Vector based voice activity detection for multi-genre broadcast speech-to-text

9 Dec 2021n/a 2021 9arXiv:2112.05016archive 2025-07-28

Misa Ogura, Matt Haynes

Voice Activity Detection (VAD) is a fundamental preprocessing step in automatic speech recognition. This is especially true within the broadcast industry where a wide variety of audio materials and recording conditions are encountered. Based on previous studies which indicate that xvector embeddings can be applied to a diverse set of audio classification tasks, we investigate the suitability of x-vectors in discriminating speech from noise. We find that the proposed x-vector based VAD system achieves the best reported score in detecting clean speech on AVA-Speech, whilst retaining robust VAD performance in the presence of noise and music. Furthermore, we integrate the x-vector based VAD system into an existing STT pipeline and compare its performance on multiple broadcast datasets against a baseline system with WebRTC VAD. Crucially, our proposed x-vector based VAD improves the accuracy of STT transcription on real-world broadcast audio

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Action DetectionActivity DetectionAudio ClassificationAutomatic Speech RecognitionAutomatic Speech Recognition (ASR)Speech RecognitionSpeech-to-Textspeech-recognition

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