Amrita Ph.D. Scholar, Mr. Kuruvachan K. George, has achieved global recognition in the recently held ‘Speakers in the Wild’ (SITW) Speaker Recognition Challenge organized by SRI International, Silicon Valley, United States. The speaker recognition technology developed at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham as part of his Ph.D. work secured 6th rank in the challenge. 

SRI hosted the SITW Speaker Recognition Challenge for Interspeech 2016 using a newly collected database. The SITW database contains hand annotated speech samples from open source media for the purpose of benchmarking speaker recognition technology on single and multi-speaker audio acquired across unconstrained or ‘wild’ conditions. The aim of the SITW challenge was to encourage teams across the world to benchmark their technologies and develop novel algorithms for improving the speaker recognition under adverse conditions (noise and short duration).

The Amrita-TCS Speaker Recognition Technology was ranked 6th at the international level, ahead of many world leaders.  The results of the SITW Speaker Recognition Challenge evaluation track are given below:

Amrita-TCS Technology is the only benchmarked speaker recognition technology from India, apart from that of IIT Guwahati (IIT-G) which ranked 8th. Post SITW Challenge, the team entered into a collaboration with IIT-G and combined the Amrita and IIT-G systems. The combined system showed a significant improvement in performance, and it is planned to communicate these results for a possible publication at Interspeech 2016(Conference of the International Speech Communication Association) to be held at San Francisco from September 8-12, 2016.

Mr. Kuruvachan received a TCS Research Scholarship in 2012.  Amrita participated in SITW Challenge jointly with TCS, under the label Amrita-TCS. The team Amrita-TCS, led by Mr. Kuruvachan, consists of his Thesis Advisor Dr. C. Santhosh Kumar (Professor, Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Coimbatore), co-advisor Dr. K. I. Ramachandran (Professor, Amrita CEN), Dr. Ashish Panda (TCS Innovation Labs., Mumbai) and Arun Das K. (M.Tech. student).

“I am proud to be part of Amrita-TCS team. We secured 6th rank in the SITW speaker recognition challenge for Interspeech 2016. I am extremely fortunate to have been part of Machine Intelligence Research Lab, Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Coimbatore, which gave me a platform for showcasing my technology at the international level. I would not have achieved this recognition, had it not been for the guidance from my Amrita-TCS team. I also take this opportunity to thank TCS for supporting my research at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham through the TCS Research Scholarship,” Kuruvachan shared.