No Arabic abstract
Enhancement algorithms for wireless acoustics sensor networks~(WASNs) are indispensable with the increasing availability and usage of connected devices with microphones. Conventional spatial filtering approaches for enhancement in WASNs approximate quantization noise with an additive Gaussian distribution, which limits performance due to the non-linear nature of quantization noise at lower bitrates. In this work, we propose a postfilter for enhancement based on Bayesian statistics to obtain a multidevice signal estimate, which explicitly models the quantization noise. Our experiments using PSNR, PESQ and MUSHRA scores demonstrate that the proposed postfilter can be used to enhance signal quality in ad-hoc sensor networks.
We propose to implement speech enhancement by the regeneration of clean speech from a salient representation extracted from the noisy signal. The network that extracts salient features is trained using a set of weight-sharing clones of the extractor network. The clones receive mel-frequency spectra of different noi
Conventional deep neural network (DNN)-based speech enhancement (SE) approaches aim to minimize the mean square error (MSE) between enhanced speech and clean reference. The MSE-optimized model may not directly improve the performance of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. If the target is to minimize the recognition error, the recognition results should be used to design the objective function for optimizing the SE model. However, the structure of an ASR system, which consists of multiple units, such as acoustic and language models, is usually complex and not differentiable. In this study, we proposed to adopt the reinforcement learning algorithm to optimize the SE model based on the recognition results. We evaluated the propsoed SE system on the Mandarin Chinese broadcast news corpus (MATBN). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively improve the ASR results with a notable 12.40% and 19.23% error rate reductions for signal to noise ratio at 0 dB and 5 dB conditions, respectively.
Supervised learning for single-channel speech enhancement requires carefully labeled training examples where the noisy mixture is input into the network and the network is trained to produce an output close to the ideal target. To relax the conditions on the training data, we consider the task of training speech enhancement networks in a self-supervised manner. We first use a limited training set of clean speech sounds and learn a latent representation by autoencoding on their magnitude spectrograms. We then autoencode on speech mixtures recorded in noisy environments and train the resulting autoencoder to share a latent representation with the clean examples. We show that using this training schema, we can now map noisy speech to its clean version using a network that is autonomously trainable without requiring labeled training examples or human intervention.
Statistical signal processing based speech enhancement methods adopt expert knowledge to design the statistical models and linear filters, which is complementary to the deep neural network (DNN) based methods which are data-driven. In this paper, by using expert knowledge from statistical signal processing for network design and optimization, we extend the conventional Kalman filtering (KF) to the supervised learning scheme, and propose the neural Kalman filtering (NKF) for speech enhancement. Two intermediate clean speech estimates are first produced from recurrent neural networks (RNN) and linear Wiener filtering (WF) separately and are then linearly combined by a learned NKF gain to yield the NKF output. Supervised joint training is applied to NKF to learn to automatically trade-off between the instantaneous linear estimation made by the WF and the long-term non-linear estimation made by the RNN. The NKF method can be seen as using expert knowledge from WF to regularize the RNN estimations to improve its generalization ability to the noise conditions unseen in the training. Experiments in different noisy conditions show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline methods both in terms of objective evaluation metrics and automatic speech recognition (ASR) word error rates (WERs).
Multi-stage learning is an effective technique to invoke multiple deep-learning modules sequentially. This paper applies multi-stage learning to speech enhancement by using a multi-stage structure, where each stage comprises a self-attention (SA) block followed by stacks of temporal convolutional network (TCN) blocks with doubling dilation factors. Each stage generates a prediction that is refined in a subsequent stage. A fusion block is inserted at the input of later stages to re-inject original information. The resulting multi-stage speech enhancement system, in short, multi-stage SA-TCN, is compared with state-of-the-art deep-learning speech enhancement methods using the LibriSpeech and VCTK data sets. The multi-stage SA-TCN systems hyper-parameters are fine-tuned, and the impact of the SA block, the fusion block and the number of stages are determined. The use of a multi-stage SA-TCN system as a front-end for automatic speech recognition systems is investigated as well. It is shown that the multi-stage SA-TCN systems perform well relative to other state-of-the-art systems in terms of speech enhancement and speech recognition scores.