Prototypical networks for small footprint text-independent speaker verification

Speaker verification aims to recognize target speakers with very few enrollment utterances. Conventional approaches learn a representation model to extract the speaker embeddings for verification. Recently, there are several new approaches in meta-learning which try to learn a shared metric space. Among these approaches, prototypical networks aim at learning a non-linear mapping from the input space to an embedding space with a predefined distance metric. In this paper, we investigate the use of prototypical networks in a small footprint text-independent speaker verification task. Our work is evaluated on SRE10 evaluation set. Experiments show that prototypical networks outperform the conventional method when the amount of data per training speaker is limited.