MultiBIC: an improved speaker segmentation technique for TV shows

Speaker segmentation systems usually have problems detecting short segments, which causes the number of deletions to be high and therefore harming the performance of the system. This is a complication when it comes to segmenting multimedia information such as movies and TV shows, where dialogs among characters are very common. In this paper a modification of the BIC algorithm is presented, which will reduce remarkably the number of deletions without causing an increase in the number of false alarms. This modification, referred to as MultiBIC, assumes that two change-points are present in a window of data, while conventional BIC approach supposes that there is just one. This causes the system to notice when there is more than one change-point in a window, finding shorter segments than traditional BIC.