Summary And Initial Results Of The 2013-2014 Speaker Recognition I-Vector Machine Learning Challenge

During late-2013 through early-2014 NIST coordinated a special i-vector challenge based on data used in previous NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluations (SREs). Unlike evaluations in the SRE series, the i-vector challenge was run entirely online and used fixed-length feature vectors projected into a low-dimensional space (i-vectors) rather than audio recordings. These changes made the challenge more readily accessible, especially to participants from outside the audio processing field. Compared to the 2012 SRE, the i-vector challenge saw an increase in the number of participants by nearly a factor of two, and a two orders of magnitude increase in the number of systems submitted for evaluation. Initial results indicate the leading system achieved an approximate 37% improvement relative to the baseline system.