Abstract—This paper presents speaker diarization mechanisms using low-cost and low-resolution wearable wireless sensors. Speaker diarization is used for identifying speaking sequence and duration for all individuals engaged in a conversation session. The key advantage of the proposed mechanisms is their ability to monitor human conversation without having to perform energy- and processing-expensive speaker identification algorithms. A prototype system was constructed for experimental acoustic diarization using low-cost and low-resolution wearable sensors. It was experimentally demonstrated that an inexpensive threshold-based diarization mechanism can be used for conversation monitoring with acceptable accuracy. But for more detection accuracy, an acoustic comparatorbased diarization is applied. It was shown that comparatorbased diarization mechanism is able to consistently deliver significantly better acoustic detection performance than threshold-based mechanism in a more distance and noise independent manner. Controlled experiments using human subjects were carried out for evaluating diarization accuracy and the sensitivity to factors such as sampling rate and inter-speaker distance during conversations.

Index Terms—wearable sensors, coversation monitoring, acoustic diarization, diagrammatic speech diarization, comparator based diarization  

Cite: Muhannad Quwaider, Subir Biswas, and ChaiYong Lim, "Conversation Monitoring via Low-cost Speaker Diarization using Wearable Wireless Sensors," Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 315-323, November 2012. doi:10.4304/jetwi.4.4.315-323