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Gender recognition by voice is a technique in which you can determine the gender category of a speaker by processing speech signals. In this tutorial, we will be trying to classify gender by voice using the TensorFlow framework in Python.
Gender recognition can be helpful in many fields, including automatic speech recognition, in which it can help improve the performance of these systems. We can also use it to categorize calls by gender, or you can add it as a feature to a virtual assistant that can distinguish the talker's gender.
Here is the table of contents:
- Preparing the Dataset
- Building the Model
- Training the Model
- Testing the Model
- Testing the Model with your own voice
Preparing the Dataset
We won't be using raw audio data since audio samples can be of any length and can be problematic regarding noise. As a result, we need to perform some feature extraction before feeding it into the neural network.
Feature extraction is always the first phase of any speech analysis task. It takes audio of any length as an input and outputs a fixed-length vector that is suitable for classification. Examples of feature extraction methods on audio are the MFCC and Mel Spectrogram.
We'll be using Mozilla's Common Voice Dataset, a corpus of speech data read by users on the Common Voice website. Its purpose is to enable the training and testing of automatic speech recognition. However, after I took a look at the dataset, many of the samples were labeled in the genre column. Therefore, we can extract these labeled samples and perform gender recognition.
Here is what I did to prepare the dataset for gender recognition:
- First, I only filtered the labeled samples in the genre field.
- After that, I balanced the dataset so that the number of female samples is equal to male samples; this will help the neural network not overfit on a particular gender.
- Finally, I've used the Mel Spectrogram extraction technique to get a vector of the length
128from each voice sample.
You can look at the prepared dataset for this tutorial in this repository.
Also, I've included the script that is responsible for preparing and preprocessing the dataset (from .mp3 into .npy files) If you want to run it on your own (although it may not be necessary), you can check it here.
To get started, install the following libraries using pip:
pip3 install numpy pandas tqdm sklearn tensorflow pyaudio librosaTo follow along, open up a new notebook and import the modules we are going to need:
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import os
import tqdm
from tensorflow.keras.models import Sequential
from tensorflow.keras.layers import Dense, LSTM, Dropout
from tensorflow.keras.callbacks import ModelCheckpoint, TensorBoard, EarlyStopping
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_splitNow to get the gender of each sample, there is a CSV metadata file (check it here) that links each audio sample's file path to its appropriate gender:
df = pd.read_csv("balanced-all.csv")
df.head()Here is how it looks like:
filename gender
0 data/cv-other-train/sample-069205.npy female
1 data/cv-valid-train/sample-063134.npy female
2 data/cv-other-train/sample-080873.npy female
3 data/cv-other-train/sample-105595.npy female
4 data/cv-valid-train/sample-144613.npy femaleLet's see how the dataframe ends:
df.tail()Output:
filename gender
66933 data/cv-valid-train/sample-171098.npy male
66934 data/cv-other-train/sample-022864.npy male
66935 data/cv-valid-train/sample-080933.npy male
66936 data/cv-other-train/sample-012026.npy male
66937 data/cv-other-train/sample-013841.npy maleLet's see the number of samples of each gender:
# get total samples
n_samples = len(df)
# get total male samples
n_male_samples = len(df[df['gender'] == 'male'])
# get total female samples
n_female_samples = len(df[df['gender'] == 'female'])
print("Total samples:", n_samples)
print("Total male samples:", n_male_samples)
print("Total female samples:", n_female_samples)Output:
Total samples: 66938
Total male samples: 33469
Total female samples: 33469Perfect, a large number of balanced audio samples, the following function loads all the files into a single array; we don't need any generation mechanism as it fits the memory (since each audio sample is only the extracted feature with the size of 1KB):
label2int = {
"male": 1,
"female": 0
}
def load_data(vector_length=128):
"""A function to load gender recognition dataset from `data` folder
After the second run, this will load from results/features.npy and results/labels.npy files
as it is much faster!"""
# make sure results folder exists
if not os.path.isdir("results"):
os.mkdir("results")
# if features & labels already loaded individually and bundled, load them from there instead
if os.path.isfile("results/features.npy") and os.path.isfile("results/labels.npy"):
X = np.load("results/features.npy")
y = np.load("results/labels.npy")
return X, y
# read dataframe
df = pd.read_csv("balanced-all.csv")
# get total samples
n_samples = len(df)
# get total male samples
n_male_samples = len(df[df['gender'] == 'male'])
# get total female samples
n_female_samples = len(df[df['gender'] == 'female'])
print("Total samples:", n_samples)
print("Total male samples:", n_male_samples)
print("Total female samples:", n_female_samples)
# initialize an empty array for all audio features
X = np.zeros((n_samples, vector_length))
# initialize an empty array for all audio labels (1 for male and 0 for female)
y = np.zeros((n_samples, 1))
for i, (filename, gender) in tqdm.tqdm(enumerate(zip(df['filename'], df['gender'])), "Loading data", total=n_samples):
features = np.load(filename)
X[i] = features
y[i] = label2int[gender]
# save the audio features and labels into files
# so we won't load each one of them next run
np.save("results/features", X)
np.save("results/labels", y)
return X, yThe above function is responsible for reading that CSV file and loading all audio samples in a single array, this will take some time the first time you run it, but it will save that bundled array in results folder, which will save us time in the second run.
label2int dictionary simply maps each gender to an integer value; we need it in the load_data() function to translate string labels to integer labels.
Now, this is a single array, but we need to split our dataset into training, testing, and validation sets. The below function is doing that:
def split_data(X, y, test_size=0.1, valid_size=0.1):
# split training set and testing set
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y, test_size=test_size, random_state=7)
# split training set and validation set
X_train, X_valid, y_train, y_valid = train_test_split(X_train, y_train, test_size=valid_size, random_state=7)
# return a dictionary of values
return {
"X_train": X_train,
"X_valid": X_valid,
"X_test": X_test,
"y_train": y_train,
"y_valid": y_valid,
"y_test": y_test
}We're using sklearn's train_test_split() convenient function, which will shuffle our dataset and split it into training and testing sets. We then rerun it on the training set to get the validation set. Let's use these functions:
# load the dataset
X, y = load_data()
# split the data into training, validation and testing sets
data = split_data(X, y, test_size=0.1, valid_size=0.1)Now this data dictionary contains everything we need to fit our model. Let's build the model then!
Building the Model
For this tutorial, we are going to use a deep feed-forward neural network with 5 hidden layers, it isn't the perfect architecture, but it does the job so far:
def create_model(vector_length=128):
"""5 hidden dense layers from 256 units to 64, not the best model."""
model = Sequential()
model.add(Dense(256, input_shape=(vector_length,)))
model.add(Dropout(0.3))
model.add(Dense(256, activation="relu"))
model.add(Dropout(0.3))
model.add(Dense(128, activation="relu"))
model.add(Dropout(0.3))
model.add(Dense(128, activation="relu"))
model.add(Dropout(0.3))
model.add(Dense(64, activation="relu"))
model.add(Dropout(0.3))
# one output neuron with sigmoid activation function, 0 means female, 1 means male
model.add(Dense(1, activation="sigmoid"))
# using binary crossentropy as it's male/female classification (binary)
model.compile(loss="binary_crossentropy", metrics=["accuracy"], optimizer="adam")
# print summary of the model
model.summary()
return modelWe're using a 30% dropout rate after each fully connected layer; this type of regularization will hopefully prevent overfitting on the training dataset. Check this tutorial to learn more about Dropout.
An important thing to note here is we're using a single output unit (neuron) with a sigmoid activation function in the output layer; the model will output the scalar 1 (or close to it) when the audio's speaker is a male, and female when it's closer to 0.
Also, we're using binary cross-entropy as the loss function, as it is a special case of categorical cross-entropy when we only have two classes to predict. Let's use this function to build our model:
# construct the model
model = create_model()Training the Model
Now that we have built the model, let's train it using the previously loaded dataset:
# use tensorboard to view metrics
tensorboard = TensorBoard(log_dir="logs")
# define early stopping to stop training after 5 epochs of not improving
early_stopping = EarlyStopping(mode="min", patience=5, restore_best_weights=True)
batch_size = 64
epochs = 100
# train the model using the training set and validating using validation set
model.fit(data["X_train"], data["y_train"], epochs=epochs, batch_size=batch_size, validation_data=(data["X_valid"], data["y_valid"]),
callbacks=[tensorboard, early_stopping])We defined two callbacks that will get executed after the end of each epoch:
- The first is the tensorboard; we will use it to see how the model goes during the training in terms of loss and accuracy.
- The second callback is early stopping; this will stop the training when the model stops improving. I've specified a patience of 5, which means it will stop training after 5 epochs of not improving, setting
restore_best_weightstoTruewill restore the optimal weights recorded during the training and assign them to the model weights.
Let's save this model:
# save the model to a file
model.save("results/model.h5")Here is my output:
Model: "sequential"
_________________________________________________________________
Layer (type) Output Shape Param #
=================================================================
dense (Dense) (None, 256) 33024
_________________________________________________________________
dropout (Dropout) (None, 256) 0
_________________________________________________________________
dense_1 (Dense) (None, 256) 65792
_________________________________________________________________
dropout_1 (Dropout) (None, 256) 0
_________________________________________________________________
dense_2 (Dense) (None, 128) 32896
_________________________________________________________________
dropout_2 (Dropout) (None, 128) 0
_________________________________________________________________
dense_3 (Dense) (None, 128) 16512
_________________________________________________________________
dropout_3 (Dropout) (None, 128) 0
_________________________________________________________________
dense_4 (Dense) (None, 64) 8256
_________________________________________________________________
dropout_4 (Dropout) (None, 64) 0
_________________________________________________________________
dense_5 (Dense) (None, 1) 65
=================================================================
Total params: 156,545
Trainable params: 156,545
Non-trainable params: 0
_________________________________________________________________
Train on 54219 samples, validate on 6025 samples
Epoch 1/100
54219/54219 [==============================] - 8s 143us/sample - loss: 0.5514 - accuracy: 0.7651 - val_loss: 0.3807 - val_accuracy: 0.8508
Epoch 2/100
54219/54219 [==============================] - 5s 93us/sample - loss: 0.4159 - accuracy: 0.8326 - val_loss: 0.3464 - val_accuracy: 0.8536
Epoch 3/100
54219/54219 [==============================] - 5s 93us/sample - loss: 0.3860 - accuracy: 0.8466 - val_loss: 0.3112 - val_accuracy: 0.8744
<..SNIPPED..>
Epoch 16/100
54219/54219 [==============================] - 5s 96us/sample - loss: 0.2864 - accuracy: 0.8936 - val_loss: 0.2387 - val_accuracy: 0.9087
Epoch 17/100
54219/54219 [==============================] - 5s 95us/sample - loss: 0.2824 - accuracy: 0.8945 - val_loss: 0.2464 - val_accuracy: 0.9110
Epoch 18/100
54219/54219 [==============================] - 6s 103us/sample - loss: 0.2887 - accuracy: 0.8920 - val_loss: 0.2406 - val_accuracy: 0.9074
Epoch 19/100
54219/54219 [==============================] - 5s 95us/sample - loss: 0.2822 - accuracy: 0.8939 - val_loss: 0.2435 - val_accuracy: 0.9080
Epoch 20/100
54219/54219 [==============================] - 5s 96us/sample - loss: 0.2813 - accuracy: 0.8957 - val_loss: 0.2567 - val_accuracy: 0.8993
Epoch 21/100
54219/54219 [==============================] - 5s 89us/sample - loss: 0.2759 - accuracy: 0.8962 - val_loss: 0.2442 - val_accuracy: 0.9112
As you can see, the model training stopped at epoch 21 and reached about 0.2387 loss and almost 91% validation accuracy (this was on epoch 16).
Testing the Model
Since the model now is trained and the weights are optimal, let's test it using the testing set we created earlier:
# evaluating the model using the testing set
print(f"Evaluating the model using {len(data['X_test'])} samples...")
loss, accuracy = model.evaluate(data["X_test"], data["y_test"], verbose=0)
print(f"Loss: {loss:.4f}")
print(f"Accuracy: {accuracy*100:.2f}%")Check this out:
Evaluating the model using 6694 samples...
Loss: 0.2405
Accuracy: 90.95%Excellent, we've reached 91% accuracy on samples that the model has never seen before! That is great!
If you open up tensorboard (using the command: tensorboard --logdir="logs"), you'll see loss and accuracy curves similar to this:
The blue curve is the validation set, whereas the orange is the training set. You can see the loss is decreasing over time, and the accuracy is increasing. That's exactly what we expected!
Testing the Model with your Voice
I know this is the exciting part, I've made a script that records your voice until you stop speaking (you can talk in any language, though) and save it to a file, then extract features from that audio and feed it to the model to retrieve results:
import librosa
import numpy as np
def extract_feature(file_name, **kwargs):
"""
Extract feature from audio file `file_name`
Features supported:
- MFCC (mfcc)
- Chroma (chroma)
- MEL Spectrogram Frequency (mel)
- Contrast (contrast)
- Tonnetz (tonnetz)
e.g:
`features = extract_feature(path, mel=True, mfcc=True)`
"""
mfcc = kwargs.get("mfcc")
chroma = kwargs.get("chroma")
mel = kwargs.get("mel")
contrast = kwargs.get("contrast")
tonnetz = kwargs.get("tonnetz")
X, sample_rate = librosa.core.load(file_name)
if chroma or contrast:
stft = np.abs(librosa.stft(X))
result = np.array([])
if mfcc:
mfccs = np.mean(librosa.feature.mfcc(y=X, sr=sample_rate, n_mfcc=40).T, axis=0)
result = np.hstack((result, mfccs))
if chroma:
chroma = np.mean(librosa.feature.chroma_stft(S=stft, sr=sample_rate).T,axis=0)
result = np.hstack((result, chroma))
if mel:
mel = np.mean(librosa.feature.melspectrogram(X, sr=sample_rate).T,axis=0)
result = np.hstack((result, mel))
if contrast:
contrast = np.mean(librosa.feature.spectral_contrast(S=stft, sr=sample_rate).T,axis=0)
result = np.hstack((result, contrast))
if tonnetz:
tonnetz = np.mean(librosa.feature.tonnetz(y=librosa.effects.harmonic(X), sr=sample_rate).T,axis=0)
result = np.hstack((result, tonnetz))
return resultThe above function is the function that is responsible for loading the audio file and extracting features from it. The below lines of code will use the argparse module to parse an audio file path passed from the command line and make inference on it:
import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="""Gender recognition script, this will load the model you trained,
and perform inference on a sample you provide (either using your voice or a file)""")
parser.add_argument("-f", "--file", help="The path to the file, preferred to be in WAV format")
args = parser.parse_args()
file = args.file
# construct the model
model = create_model()
# load the saved/trained weights
model.load_weights("results/model.h5")
if not file or not os.path.isfile(file):
# if file not provided, or it doesn't exist, use your voice
print("Please talk")
# put the file name here
file = "test.wav"
# record the file (start talking)
record_to_file(file)
# extract features and reshape it
features = extract_feature(file, mel=True).reshape(1, -1)
# predict the gender!
male_prob = model.predict(features)[0][0]
female_prob = 1 - male_prob
gender = "male" if male_prob > female_prob else "female"
# show the result!
print("Result:", gender)
print(f"Probabilities::: Male: {male_prob*100:.2f}% Female: {female_prob*100:.2f}%")This won't work if you execute it, as the record_to_file() method isn't defined (you can check the complete script code here), but this helps me explain the code.
We're using the argparse module to parse the file path passed from command lines if the file isn't passed (using --file or -f parameter), the script will start recording using your default microphone.
We then create the model and load the optimal weights we trained before, and then we extract the features of that audio file passed (or recorded), and we use model.predict() to get the resulting predictions. Here is an example:
$ python test.py --file "test-samples/16-122828-0002.wav"Output:
Result: female
Probabilities: Male: 20.77% Female: 79.23%And indeed, that sample that was grabbed from the LibriSpeech dataset is a female! Again, get the code here.
Related: How to Play and Record Audio in Python
Conclusion
Now, you have many options to make the model more accurate. One is trying to develop another model architecture, and you can also use Convolution or recurrent nets to see the results! I can expect you to reach more than 95% accuracy, if you did so, please don't hesitate to share it with us in the comments below!
You can also download the original dataset from Kaggle and use another feature extraction technique, such as MFCC, using the provided extract_feature() function, and then you can compare the results.
The whole tutorial material is located in this repository. Check it out!
Finally, there is a similar tutorial in which you'll learn how to recognize emotions from speech as well. Check it out!
Learn also: Gender Detection using OpenCV in Python.
Happy Learning ♥
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