Speaker diarization for multi-microphone meetings using only between-channel differences

We present a method to extract speaker turn segmentation from multiple distant microphones (MDM) using only delay values found via a cross-correlation between the available channels. The method is robust against the number of speakers (which is unknown to the system), the number of channels, and the acoustics of the room. The delays between channels are processed and clustered to obtain a segmentation hypothesis. We have obtained a 31.2% diarization error rate (DER) for the NIST's RT05s MDM conference room evaluation set. For a MDM subset of NIST's RT04s development set, we have obtained 36.93% DER and 35.73% DER*. Comparing those results with the ones presented by Ellis and Liu [8], who also used between-channels differences for the same data, we have obtained 43% relative improvement in the error rate.