No Arabic abstract
Many applications of single channel source separation (SCSS) including automatic speech recognition (ASR), hearing aids etc. require an estimation of only one source from a mixture of many sources. Treating this special case as a regular SCSS problem where in all constituent sources are given equal priority in terms of reconstruction may result in a suboptimal separation performance. In this paper, we tackle the one source separation problem by suitably modifying the orthodox SCSS framework and focus only on one source at a time. The proposed approach is a generic framework that can be applied to any existing SCSS algorithm, improves performance, and scales well when there are more than two sources in the mixture unlike most existing SCSS methods. Additionally, existing SCSS algorithms rely on fine hyper-parameter tuning hence making them difficult to use in practice. Our framework takes a step towards automatic tuning of the hyper-parameters thereby making our method better suited for the mixture to be separated and thus practically more useful. We test our framework on a neural network based algorithm and the results show an improved performance in terms of SDR and SAR.
Speech separation has been successfully applied as a frontend processing module of conversation transcription systems thanks to its ability to handle overlapped speech and its flexibility to combine with downstream tasks such as automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, a speech separation model often introduces target speech distortion, resulting in a sub-optimum word error rate (WER). In this paper, we describe our efforts to improve the performance of a single channel speech separation system. Specifically, we investigate a two-stage training scheme that firstly applies a feature level optimization criterion for pretraining, followed by an ASR-oriented optimization criterion using an end-to-end (E2E) speech recognition model. Meanwhile, to keep the model light-weight, we introduce a modified teacher-student learning technique for model compression. By combining those approaches, we achieve a absolute average WER improvement of 2.70% and 0.77% using models with less than 10M parameters compared with the previous state-of-the-art results on the LibriCSS dataset for utterance-wise evaluation and continuous evaluation, respectively
We propose a block-online algorithm of guided source separation (GSS). GSS is a speech separation method that uses diarization information to update parameters of the generative model of observation signals. Previous studies have shown that GSS performs well in multi-talker scenarios. However, it requires a large amount of calculation time, which is an obstacle to the deployment of online applications. It is also a problem that the offline GSS is an utterance-wise algorithm so that it produces latency according to the length of the utterance. With the proposed algorithm, block-wise input samples and corresponding time annotations are concatenated with those in the preceding context and used to update the parameters. Using the context enables the algorithm to estimate time-frequency masks accurately only from one iteration of optimization for each block, and its latency does not depend on the utterance length but predetermined block length. It also reduces calculation cost by updating only the parameters of active speakers in each block and its context. Evaluation on the CHiME-6 corpus and a meeting corpus showed that the proposed algorithm achieved almost the same performance as the conventional offline GSS algorithm but with 32x faster calculation, which is sufficient for real-time applications.
Speaker Diarization is the problem of separating speakers in an audio. There could be any number of speakers and final result should state when speaker starts and ends. In this project, we analyze given audio file with 2 channels and 2 speakers (on separate channel). We train Neural Network for learning when a person is speaking. We use different type of Neural Networks specifically, Single Layer Perceptron (SLP), Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Convolution Neural Network (CNN) we achieve $sim$92% of accuracy with RNN. The code for this project is available at https://github.com/vishalshar/SpeakerDiarization_RNN_CNN_LSTM
Target speech separation refers to extracting a target speakers voice from an overlapped audio of simultaneous talkers. Previously the use of visual modality for target speech separation has demonstrated great potentials. This work proposes a general multi-modal framework for target speech separation by utilizing all the available information of the target speaker, including his/her spatial location, voice characteristics and lip movements. Also, under this framework, we investigate on the fusion methods for multi-modal joint modeling. A factorized attention-based fusion method is proposed to aggregate the high-level semantic information of multi-modalities at embedding level. This method firstly factorizes the mixture audio into a set of acoustic subspaces, then leverages the targets information from other modalities to enhance these subspace acoustic embeddings with a learnable attention scheme. To validate the robustness of proposed multi-modal separation model in practical scenarios, the system was evaluated under the condition that one of the modalities is temporarily missing, invalid or corrupted. Experiments are conducted on a large-scale audio-visual dataset collected from YouTube (to be released) that spatialized by simulated room impulse responses (RIRs). Experiment results illustrate that our proposed multi-modal framework significantly outperforms single-modal and bi-modal speech separation approaches, while can still support real-time processing.
Modules in all existing speech separation networks can be categorized into single-input-multi-output (SIMO) modules and single-input-single-output (SISO) modules. SIMO modules generate more outputs than input, and SISO modules keep the numbers of input and output the same. While the majority of separation models only contain SIMO architectures, it has also been shown that certain two-stage separation systems integrated with a post-enhancement SISO module can improve the separation quality. Why performance improvements can be achieved by incorporating the SISO modules? Are SIMO modules always necessary? In this paper, we empirically examine those questions by designing models with varying configurations in the SIMO and SISO modules. We show that comparing with the standard SIMO-only design, a mixed SIMO-SISO design with a same model size is able to improve the separation performance especially under low-overlap conditions. We further validate the necessity of SIMO modules and show that SISO-only models are still able to perform separation without sacrificing the performance. The observations allow us to rethink the model design paradigm and present different views on how the separation is performed.