No Arabic abstract
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been used in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to learn representations directly from the raw signal instead of hand-crafted acoustic features, providing a richer and lossless input signal. Recent researches propose to inject prior acoustic knowledge to the first convolutional layer by integrating the shape of the impulse responses in order to increase both the interpretability of the learnt acoustic model, and its performances. We propose to combine the complex Gabor filter with complex-valued deep neural networks to replace usual CNN weights kernels, to fully take advantage of its optimal time-frequency resolution and of the complex domain. The conducted experiments on the TIMIT phoneme recognition task shows that the proposed approach reaches top-of-the-line performances while remaining interpretable.
Glottal Closure Instants (GCIs) correspond to the temporal locations of significant excitation to the vocal tract occurring during the production of voiced speech. GCI detection from speech signals is a well-studied problem given its importance in speech processing. Most of the existing approaches for GCI detection adopt a two-stage approach (i) Transformation of speech signal into a representative signal where GCIs are localized better, (ii) extraction of GCIs using the representative signal obtained in first stage. The former stage is accomplished using signal processing techniques based on the principles of speech production and the latter with heuristic-algorithms such as dynamic-programming and peak-picking. These methods are thus task-specific and rely on the methods used for representative signal extraction. However, in this paper, we formulate the GCI detection problem from a representation learning perspective where appropriate representation is implicitly learned from the raw-speech data samples. Specifically, GCI detection is cast as a supervised multi-task learning problem solved using a deep convolutional neural network jointly optimizing a classification and regression cost. The learning capability is demonstrated with several experiments on standard datasets. The results compare well with the state-of-the-art algorithms while performing better in the case of presence of real-world non-stationary noise.
To date, mainstream target speech separation (TSS) approaches are formulated to estimate the complex ratio mask (cRM) of the target speech in time-frequency domain under supervised deep learning framework. However, the existing deep models for estimating cRM are designed in the way that the real and imaginary parts of the cRM are separately modeled using real-valued training data pairs. The research motivation of this study is to design a deep model that fully exploits the temporal-spectral-spatial information of multi-channel signals for estimating cRM directly and efficiently in complex domain. As a result, a novel TSS network is designed consisting of two modules, a complex neural spatial filter (cNSF) and an MVDR. Essentially, cNSF is a cRM estimation model and an MVDR module is cascaded to the cNSF module to reduce the nonlinear speech distortions introduced by neural network. Specifically, to fit the cRM target, all input features of cNSF are reformulated into complex-valued representations following the supervised learning paradigm. Then, to achieve good hierarchical feature abstraction, a complex deep neural network (cDNN) is delicately designed with U-Net structure. Experiments conducted on simulated multi-channel speech data demonstrate the proposed cNSF outperforms the baseline NSF by 12.1% scale-invariant signal-to-distortion ratio and 33.1% word error rate.
This paper presents a technique to interpret and visualize intermediate layers in CNNs trained on raw speech data in an unsupervised manner. We show that averaging over feature maps after ReLU activation in each convolutional layer yields interpretable time-series data. The proposed technique enables acoustic analysis of intermediate convolutional layers. To uncover how meaningful representation in speech gets encoded in intermediate layers of CNNs, we manipulate individual latent variables to marginal levels outside of the training range. We train and probe internal representations on two models -- a bare WaveGAN architecture and a ciwGAN extension which forces the Generator to output informative data and results in emergence of linguistically meaningful representations. Interpretation and visualization is performed for three basic acoustic properties of speech: periodic vibration (corresponding to vowels), aperiodic noise vibration (corresponding to fricatives), and silence (corresponding to stops). We also argue that the proposed technique allows acoustic analysis of intermediate layers that parallels the acoustic analysis of human speech data: we can extract F0, intensity, duration, formants, and other acoustic properties from intermediate layers in order to test where and how CNNs encode various types of information. The models are trained on two speech processes with different degrees of complexity: a simple presence of [s] and a computationally complex presence of reduplication (copied material). Observing the causal effect between interpolation and the resulting changes in intermediate layers can reveal how individual variables get transformed into spikes in activation in intermediate layers. Using the proposed technique, we can analyze how linguistically meaningful units in speech get encoded in different convolutional layers.
The performance of an Acoustic Scene Classification (ASC) system is highly depending on the latent temporal dynamics of the audio signal. In this paper, we proposed a multiple layers temporal pooling method using CNN feature sequence as in-put, which can effectively capture the temporal dynamics for an entire audio signal with arbitrary duration by building direct connections between the sequence and its time indexes. We applied our novel framework on DCASE 2018 task 1, ASC. For evaluation, we trained a Support Vector Machine (SVM) with the proposed Multi-Layered Temporal Pooling (MLTP) learned features. Experimental results on the development dataset, usage of the MLTP features significantly improved the ASC performance. The best performance with 75.28% accuracy was achieved by using the optimal setting found in our experiments.
Speech enhancement (SE) aims to reduce noise in speech signals. Most SE techniques focus on addressing audio information only. In this work, inspired by multimodal learning, which utilizes data from different modalities, and the recent success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in SE, we propose an audio-visual deep CNN (AVDCNN) SE model, which incorporates audio and visual streams into a unified network model. In the proposed AVDCNN SE model, audio and visual data are first processed using individual CNNs, and then, fused into a joint network to generate enhanced speech at the output layer. The AVDCNN model is trained in an end-to-end manner, and parameters are jointly learned through back-propagation. We evaluate enhanced speech using five objective criteria. Results show that the AVDCNN yields notably better performance, compared with an audio-only CNN-based SE model and two conventional SE approaches, confirming the effectiveness of integrating visual information into the SE process.