Online Speaker Change Detection by Combining BIC with Microphone Array Beamforming

In this paper we consider the problem of detecting speaker changes in audio signals recorded by distant microphones. It is shown that the possibility to exploit the spatial separation of speakers more than makes up the degradation in detection accuracy due to the increased source-to-sensor distance compared to close-talking microphones. Speaker direction information is derived from the filter coefficients of an adaptive Filter-and-Sum Beamformer and is combined with BIC analysis. The experimental results reveal significant improvements compared to BIC-only change detection, be it with the distant or close-talking microphone.