No Arabic abstract
While recent progresses in neural network approaches to single-channel speech separation, or more generally the cocktail party problem, achieved significant improvement, their performance for complex mixtures is still not satisfactory. In this work, we propose a novel multi-channel framework for multi-talker separation. In the proposed model, an input multi-channel mixture signal is firstly converted to a set of beamformed signals using fixed beam patterns. For this beamforming, we propose to use differential beamformers as they are more suitable for speech separation. Then each beamformed signal is fed into a single-channel anchored deep attractor network to generate separated signals. And the final separation is acquired by post selecting the separating output for each beams. To evaluate the proposed system, we create a challenging dataset comprising mixtures of 2, 3 or 4 speakers. Our results show that the proposed system largely improves the state of the art in speech separation, achieving 11.5 dB, 11.76 dB and 11.02 dB average signal-to-distortion ratio improvement for 4, 3 and 2 overlapped speaker mixtures, which is comparable to the performance of a minimum variance distortionless response beamformer that uses oracle location, source, and noise information. We also run speech recognition with a clean trained acoustic model on the separated speech, achieving relative word error rate (WER) reduction of 45.76%, 59.40% and 62.80% on fully overlapped speech of 4, 3 and 2 speakers, respectively. With a far talk acoustic model, the WER is further reduced.
We present the concept of an acoustic rake receiver---a microphone beamformer that uses echoes to improve the noise and interference suppression. The rake idea is well-known in wireless communications; it involves constructively combining different multipath components that arrive at the receiver antennas. Unlike spread-spectrum signals used in wireless communications, speech signals are not orthogonal to their shifts. Therefore, we focus on the spatial structure, rather than temporal. Instead of explicitly estimating the channel, we create correspondences between early echoes in time and image sources in space. These multiple sources of the desired and the interfering signal offer additional spatial diversity that we can exploit in the beamformer design. We present several intuitive and optimal formulations of acoustic rake receivers, and show theoretically and numerically that the rake formulation of the maximum signal-to-interference-and-noise beamformer offers significant performance boosts in terms of noise and interference suppression. Beyond signal-to-noise ratio, we observe gains in terms of the emph{perceptual evaluation of speech quality} (PESQ) metric for the speech quality. We accompany the paper by the complete simulation and processing chain written in Python. The code and the sound samples are available online at url{http://lcav.github.io/AcousticRakeReceiver/}.
We consider the problem of decorrelating states of coupled quantum systems. The decorrelation can be seen as separation of quantum signals, in analogy to the classical problem of signal-separation rising in the so-called cocktail-party context. The separation of signals cannot be achieved perfectly, and we analyse the optimal decorrelation map in terms of added noise in the local separated states. Analytical results can be obtained both in the case of two-level quantum systems and for Gaussian states of harmonic oscillators.
We describe a private audio messaging system that uses echoes to unscramble messages at a few predetermined locations in a room. The system works by splitting the audio into short chunks and emitting them from different loudspeakers. The chunks are filtered so that as they echo around the room, they sum to noise everywhere except at a few chosen focusing spots where they exactly reproduce the intended messages. Unlike in the case of standard personal audio zones, the proposed method renders sound outside the focusing spots unintelligible. Our method essentially depends on echoes: the room acts as a mixing system such that at given points we get the desired output. Finally, we only require a modest number of loudspeakers and only a few impulse response measurements at points where the messages should be delivered. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method via objective quantitative metrics as well as informal listening experiments in a real room.
We present a joint audio-visual model for isolating a single speech signal from a mixture of sounds such as other speakers and background noise. Solving this task using only audio as input is extremely challenging and does not provide an association of the separated speech signals with speakers in the video. In this paper, we present a deep network-based model that incorporates both visual and auditory signals to solve this task. The visual features are used to focus the audio on desired speakers in a scene and to improve the speech separation quality. To train our joint audio-visual model, we introduce AVSpeech, a new dataset comprised of thousands of hours of video segments from the Web. We demonstrate the applicability of our method to classic speech separation tasks, as well as real-world scenarios involving heated interviews, noisy bars, and screaming children, only requiring the user to specify the face of the person in the video whose speech they want to isolate. Our method shows clear advantage over state-of-the-art audio-only speech separation in cases of mixed speech. In addition, our model, which is speaker-independent (trained once, applicable to any speaker), produces better results than recent audio-visual speech separation methods that are speaker-dependent (require training a separate model for each speaker of interest).
Teaching with the cooperation of expert teacher and assistant teacher, which is the so-called double-teachers classroom, i.e., the course is giving by the expert online and presented through projection screen at the classroom, and the teacher at the classroom performs as an assistant for guiding the students in learning, is becoming more prevalent in todays teaching method for K-12 education. For monitoring the teaching quality, a microphone clipped on the assistants neckline is always used for voice recording, then fed to the downstream tasks of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and neural language processing (NLP). However, besides its voice, there would be some other interfering voices, including the experts one and the students one. Here, we propose to extract the assistant voices from the perspective of sound event detection, i.e., the voices are classified into four categories, namely the expert, the teacher, the mixture of them, and the background. To make frame-level identification, which is important for grabbing sensitive words for the downstream tasks, a multi-scale temporal convolution neural network is constructed with stacked dilated convolutions for considering both local and global properties. These features are concatenated and fed to a classification network constructed by three linear layers. The framework is evaluated on simulated data and real-world recordings, giving considerable performance in terms of precision and recall, compared with some classical classification methods.