Speaking rate estimation for multi-speakers

It is important to estimate speaking rates of multispeakers in multi-participants conversational speech, especially speaking rate of dominant participant. This paper proposes an algorithm for estimating speaking rates of multi-speakers. In the proposed algorithm, speaker segmentation and clustering are first performed. As a result, number of speakers and the corresponding speech of each speaker are obtained. Finally, detecting the local maxima of energy envelope of each speaker's speech and then speaking rate of each speaker is defined as total number of local maxima divided by length of each speaker's speech. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can estimate speaking rates of multi-speakers with satisfactory results, whereas the previous algorithms can only estimate speaking rate of single speaker.