Event-driven Pipeline for Low-latency Low-compute Keyword Spotting and Speaker Verification System

Abstract

This work presents an event-driven acoustic sensor processing pipeline to power a low-resource voice-activated smart assistant. The pipeline includes four major steps; namely localization, source separation, keyword spotting (KWS) and speaker verification (SV). The pipeline is driven by a front-end binaural spiking silicon cochlea sensor. The timing information carried by the output spikes of the cochlea provide spatial cues for localization and source separation. Spike features are generated with low latencies from the separated source spikes and are used by both KWS and SV which rely on state-of-the-art deep recurrent neural network architectures with a small memory footprint. Evaluation on a self-recorded event dataset based on TIDIGITS shows accuracies of over 93% and 88% on KWS and SV respectively, with minimum system latency of 5 ms on a limited resource device.