Microphone Array Geometry Independent Multi-Talker Distant ASR: NTT System for the DASR Task of the CHiME-8 Challenge

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Kamo, Naoyuki, Tawara, Naohiro, Ando, Atsushi, Kano, Takatomo, Sato, Hiroshi, Ikeshita, Rintaro, Moriya, Takafumi, Horiguchi, Shota, Matsuura, Kohei, Ogawa, Atsunori, Plaquet, Alexis, Ashihara, Takanori, Ochiai, Tsubasa, Mimura, Masato, Delcroix, Marc, Nakatani, Tomohiro, Asami, Taichi, Araki, Shoko
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Kamo, Naoyuki
Tawara, Naohiro
Ando, Atsushi
Kano, Takatomo
Sato, Hiroshi
Ikeshita, Rintaro
Moriya, Takafumi
Horiguchi, Shota
Matsuura, Kohei
Ogawa, Atsunori
Plaquet, Alexis
Ashihara, Takanori
Ochiai, Tsubasa
Mimura, Masato
Delcroix, Marc
Nakatani, Tomohiro
Asami, Taichi
Araki, Shoko
author_facet Kamo, Naoyuki
Tawara, Naohiro
Ando, Atsushi
Kano, Takatomo
Sato, Hiroshi
Ikeshita, Rintaro
Moriya, Takafumi
Horiguchi, Shota
Matsuura, Kohei
Ogawa, Atsunori
Plaquet, Alexis
Ashihara, Takanori
Ochiai, Tsubasa
Mimura, Masato
Delcroix, Marc
Nakatani, Tomohiro
Asami, Taichi
Araki, Shoko
contents In this paper, we introduce a multi-talker distant automatic speech recognition (DASR) system we designed for the DASR task 1 of the CHiME-8 challenge. Our system performs speaker counting, diarization, and ASR. It handles various recording conditions, from diner parties to professional meetings and from two to eight speakers. We perform diarization first, followed by speech enhancement, and then ASR as the challenge baseline. However, we introduced several key refinements. First, we derived a powerful speaker diarization relying on end-to-end speaker diarization with vector clustering (EEND-VC), multi-channel speaker counting using enhanced embeddings from EEND-VC, and target-speaker voice activity detection (TS-VAD). For speech enhancement, we introduced a novel microphone selection rule to better select the most relevant microphones among the distributed microphones and investigated improvements to beamforming. Finally, for ASR, we developed several models exploiting Whisper and WavLM speech foundation models. We present the results we submitted to the challenge and updated results we obtained afterward. Our strongest system achieves a 63% relative macro tcpWER improvement over the baseline and outperforms the challenge best results on the NOTSOFAR-1 meeting evaluation data among geometry-independent systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_09859
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Microphone Array Geometry Independent Multi-Talker Distant ASR: NTT System for the DASR Task of the CHiME-8 Challenge
Kamo, Naoyuki
Tawara, Naohiro
Ando, Atsushi
Kano, Takatomo
Sato, Hiroshi
Ikeshita, Rintaro
Moriya, Takafumi
Horiguchi, Shota
Matsuura, Kohei
Ogawa, Atsunori
Plaquet, Alexis
Ashihara, Takanori
Ochiai, Tsubasa
Mimura, Masato
Delcroix, Marc
Nakatani, Tomohiro
Asami, Taichi
Araki, Shoko
Audio and Speech Processing
Signal Processing
In this paper, we introduce a multi-talker distant automatic speech recognition (DASR) system we designed for the DASR task 1 of the CHiME-8 challenge. Our system performs speaker counting, diarization, and ASR. It handles various recording conditions, from diner parties to professional meetings and from two to eight speakers. We perform diarization first, followed by speech enhancement, and then ASR as the challenge baseline. However, we introduced several key refinements. First, we derived a powerful speaker diarization relying on end-to-end speaker diarization with vector clustering (EEND-VC), multi-channel speaker counting using enhanced embeddings from EEND-VC, and target-speaker voice activity detection (TS-VAD). For speech enhancement, we introduced a novel microphone selection rule to better select the most relevant microphones among the distributed microphones and investigated improvements to beamforming. Finally, for ASR, we developed several models exploiting Whisper and WavLM speech foundation models. We present the results we submitted to the challenge and updated results we obtained afterward. Our strongest system achieves a 63% relative macro tcpWER improvement over the baseline and outperforms the challenge best results on the NOTSOFAR-1 meeting evaluation data among geometry-independent systems.
title Microphone Array Geometry Independent Multi-Talker Distant ASR: NTT System for the DASR Task of the CHiME-8 Challenge
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09859