No Arabic abstract
Speech separation aims to separate individual voice from an audio mixture of multiple simultaneous talkers. Although audio-only approaches achieve satisfactory performance, they build on a strategy to handle the predefined conditions, limiting their application in the complex auditory scene. Towards the cocktail party problem, we propose a novel audio-visual speech separation model. In our model, we use the face detector to detect the number of speakers in the scene and use visual information to avoid the permutation problem. To improve our models generalization ability to unknown speakers, we extract speech-related visual features from visual inputs explicitly by the adversarially disentangled method, and use this feature to assist speech separation. Besides, the time-domain approach is adopted, which could avoid the phase reconstruction problem existing in the time-frequency domain models. To compare our models performance with other models, we create two benchmark datasets of 2-speaker mixture from GRID and TCDTIMIT audio-visual datasets. Through a series of experiments, our proposed model is shown to outperform the state-of-the-art audio-only model and three audio-visual models.
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).
Human auditory cortex excels at selectively suppressing background noise to focus on a target speaker. The process of selective attention in the brain is known to contextually exploit the available audio and visual cues to better focus on target speaker while filtering out other noises. In this study, we propose a novel deep neural network (DNN) based audiovisual (AV) mask estimation model. The proposed AV mask estimation model contextually integrates the temporal dynamics of both audio and noise-immune visual features for improved mask estimation and speech separation. For optimal AV features extraction and ideal binary mask (IBM) estimation, a hybrid DNN architecture is exploited to leverages the complementary strengths of a stacked long short term memory (LSTM) and convolution LSTM network. The comparative simulation results in terms of speech quality and intelligibility demonstrate significant performance improvement of our proposed AV mask estimation model as compared to audio-only and visual-only mask estimation approaches for both speaker dependent and independent scenarios.
Variational auto-encoders (VAEs) are deep generative latent variable models that can be used for learning the distribution of complex data. VAEs have been successfully used to learn a probabilistic prior over speech signals, which is then used to perform speech enhancement. One advantage of this generative approach is that it does not require pairs of clean and noisy speech signals at training. In this paper, we propose audio-visual variants of VAEs for single-channel and speaker-independent speech enhancement. We develop a conditional VAE (CVAE) where the audio speech generative process is conditioned on visual information of the lip region. At test time, the audio-visual speech generative model is combined with a noise model based on nonnegative matrix factorization, and speech enhancement relies on a Monte Carlo expectation-maximization algorithm. Experiments are conducted with the recently published NTCD-TIMIT dataset as well as the GRID corpus. The results confirm that the proposed audio-visual CVAE effectively fuses audio and visual information, and it improves the speech enhancement performance compared with the audio-only VAE model, especially when the speech signal is highly corrupted by noise. We also show that the proposed unsupervised audio-visual speech enhancement approach outperforms a state-of-the-art supervised deep learning method.
Reverberation from audio reflecting off surfaces and objects in the environment not only degrades the quality of speech for human perception, but also severely impacts the accuracy of automatic speech recognition. Prior work attempts to remove reverberation based on the audio modality only. Our idea is to learn to dereverberate speech from audio-visual observations. The visual environment surrounding a human speaker reveals important cues about the room geometry, materials, and speaker location, all of which influence the precise reverberation effects in the audio stream. We introduce Visually-Informed Dereverberation of Audio (VIDA), an end-to-end approach that learns to remove reverberation based on both the observed sounds and visual scene. In support of this new task, we develop a large-scale dataset that uses realistic acoustic renderings of speech in real-world 3D scans of homes offering a variety of room acoustics. Demonstrating our approach on both simulated and real imagery for speech enhancement, speech recognition, and speaker identification, we show it achieves state-of-the-art performance and substantially improves over traditional audio-only methods. Project page: http://vision.cs.utexas.edu/projects/learning-audio-visual-dereverberation.
We introduce a new approach for audio-visual speech separation. Given a video, the goal is to extract the speech associated with a face in spite of simultaneous background sounds and/or other human speakers. Whereas existing methods focus on learning the alignment between the speakers lip movements and the sounds they generate, we propose to leverage the speakers face appearance as an additional prior to isolate the corresponding vocal qualities they are likely to produce. Our approach jointly learns audio-visual speech separation and cross-modal speaker embeddings from unlabeled video. It yields state-of-the-art results on five benchmark datasets for audio-visual speech separation and enhancement, and generalizes well to challenging real-world videos of diverse scenarios. Our video results and code: http://vision.cs.utexas.edu/projects/VisualVoice/.