No Arabic abstract
This study investigated the waveform representation for audio signal classification. Recently, many studies on audio waveform classification such as acoustic event detection and music genre classification have been published. Most studies on audio waveform classification have proposed the use of a deep learning (neural network) framework. Generally, a frequency analysis method such as Fourier transform is applied to extract the frequency or spectral information from the input audio waveform before inputting the raw audio waveform into the neural network. In contrast to these previous studies, in this paper, we propose a novel waveform representation method, in which audio waveforms are represented as a bit sequence, for audio classification. In our experiment, we compare the proposed bit representation waveform, which is directly given to a neural network, to other representations of audio waveforms such as a raw audio waveform and a power spectrum with two classification tasks: one is an acoustic event classification task and the other is a sound/music classification task. The experimental results showed that the bit representation waveform achieved the best classification performance for both the tasks.
Deep neural networks can learn complex and abstract representations, that are progressively obtained by combining simpler ones. A recent trend in speech and speaker recognition consists in discovering these representations starting from raw audio samples directly. Differently from standard hand-crafted features such as MFCCs or FBANK, the raw waveform can potentially help neural networks discover better and more customized representations. The high-dimensional raw inputs, however, can make training significantly more challenging. This paper summarizes our recent efforts to develop a neural architecture that efficiently processes speech from audio waveforms. In particular, we propose SincNet, a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that encourages the first layer to discover meaningful filters by exploiting parametrized sinc functions. In contrast to standard CNNs, which learn all the elements of each filter, only low and high cutoff frequencies of band-pass filters are directly learned from data. This inductive bias offers a very compact way to derive a customized front-end, that only depends on some parameters with a clear physical meaning. Our experiments, conducted on both speaker and speech recognition, show that the proposed architecture converges faster, performs better, and is more computationally efficient than standard CNNs.
The social media revolution has produced a plethora of web services to which users can easily upload and share multimedia documents. Despite the popularity and convenience of such services, the sharing of such inherently personal data, including speech data, raises obvious security and privacy concerns. In particular, a users speech data may be acquired and used with speech synthesis systems to produce high-quality speech utterances which reflect the same users speaker identity. These utterances may then be used to attack speaker verification systems. One solution to mitigate these concerns involves the concealing of speaker identities before the sharing of speech data. For this purpose, we present a new approach to speaker anonymization. The idea is to extract linguistic and speaker identity features from an utterance and then to use these with neural acoustic and waveform models to synthesize anonymized speech. The original speaker identity, in the form of timbre, is suppressed and replaced with that of an anonymous pseudo identity. The approach exploits state-of-the-art x-vector speaker representations. These are used to derive anonymized pseudo speaker identities through the combination of multiple, random speaker x-vectors. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is effective in concealing speaker identities. It increases the equal error rate of a speaker verification system while maintaining high quality, anonymized speech.
End-to-end approaches for automatic speech recognition (ASR) benefit from directly modeling the probability of the word sequence given the input audio stream in a single neural network. However, compared to conventional ASR systems, these models typically require more data to achieve comparable results. Well-known model adaptation techniques, to account for domain and style adaptation, are not easily applicable to end-to-end systems. Conventional HMM-based systems, on the other hand, have been optimized for various production environments and use cases. In this work, we propose to combine the benefits of end-to-end approaches with a conventional system using an attention-based discriminative language model that learns to rescore the output of a first-pass ASR system. We show that learning to rescore a list of potential ASR outputs is much simpler than learning to generate the hypothesis. The proposed model results in 8% improvement in word error rate even when the amount of training data is a fraction of data used for training the first-pass system.
In this work, we propose DiffWave, a versatile diffusion probabilistic model for conditional and unconditional waveform generation. The model is non-autoregressive, and converts the white noise signal into structured waveform through a Markov chain with a constant number of steps at synthesis. It is efficiently trained by optimizing a variant of variational bound on the data likelihood. DiffWave produces high-fidelity audios in different waveform generation tasks, including neural vocoding conditioned on mel spectrogram, class-conditional generation, and unconditional generation. We demonstrate that DiffWave matches a strong WaveNet vocoder in terms of speech quality (MOS: 4.44 versus 4.43), while synthesizing orders of magnitude faster. In particular, it significantly outperforms autoregressive and GAN-based waveform models in the challenging unconditional generation task in terms of audio quality and sample diversity from various automatic and human evaluations.
In this paper, we present an efficient neural network for end-to-end general purpose audio source separation. Specifically, the backbone structure of this convolutional network is the SUccessive DOwnsampling and Resampling of Multi-Resolution Features (SuDoRMRF) as well as their aggregation which is performed through simple one-dimensional convolutions. In this way, we are able to obtain high quality audio source separation with limited number of floating point operations, memory requirements, number of parameters and latency. Our experiments on both speech and environmental sound separation datasets show that SuDoRMRF performs comparably and even surpasses various state-of-the-art approaches with significantly higher computational resource requirements.