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Register a new userDNN-based mask estimation for distributed speech enhancement in spatially unconstrained microphone arrays
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Added by
Nicolas Furnon
Publication date
2020
fields
Electronic Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Deep neural network (DNN)-based speech enhancement algorithms in microphone arrays have now proven to be efficient solutions to speech understanding and speech recognition in noisy environments. However, in the context of ad-hoc microphone arrays, many challenges remain and raise the need for distributed processing. In this paper, we propose to extend a previously introduced distributed DNN-based time-frequency mask estimation scheme that can efficiently use spatial information in form of so-called compressed signals which are pre-filtered target estimations. We study the performance of this algorithm under realistic acoustic conditions and investigate practical aspects of its optimal application. We show that the nodes in the microphone array cooperate by taking profit of their spatial coverage in the room. We also propose to use the compressed signals not only to convey the target estimation but also the noise estimation in order to exploit the acoustic diversity recorded throughout the microphone array.
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Multichannel processing is widely used for speech enhancement but several limitations appear when trying to deploy these solutions to the real-world. Distributed sensor arrays that consider several devices with a few microphones is a viable alternative that allows for exploiting the multiple devices equipped with microphones that we are using in our everyday life. In this context, we propose to extend the distributed adaptive node-specific signal estimation approach to a neural networks framework. At each node, a local filtering is performed to send one signal to the other nodes where a mask is estimated by a neural network in order to compute a global multi-channel Wiener filter. In an array of two nodes, we show that this additional signal can be efficiently taken into account to predict the masks and leads to better speech enhancement performances than when the mask estimation relies only on the local signals.
Speech separation with several speakers is a challenging task because of the non-stationarity of the speech and the strong signal similarity between interferent sources. Current state-of-the-art solutions can separate well the different sources using sophisticated deep neural networks which are very tedious to train. When several microphones are available, spatial information can be exploited to design much simpler algorithms to discriminate speakers. We propose a distributed algorithm that can process spatial information in a spatially unconstrained microphone array. The algorithm relies on a convolutional recurrent neural network that can exploit the signal diversity from the distributed nodes. In a typical case of a meeting room, this algorithm can capture an estimate of each source in a first step and propagate it over the microphone array in order to increase the separation performance in a second step. We show that this approach performs even better when the number of sources and nodes increases. We also study the influence of a mismatch in the number of sources between the training and testing conditions.
Speech enhancement promises higher efficiency in ad-hoc microphone arrays than in constrained microphone arrays thanks to the wide spatial coverage of the devices in the acoustic scene. However, speech enhancement in ad-hoc microphone arrays still raises many challenges. In particular, the algorithms should be able to handle a variable number of microphones, as some devices in the array might appear or disappear. In this paper, we propose a solution that can efficiently process the spatial information captured by the different devices of the microphone array, while being robust to a link failure. To do this, we use an attention mechanism in order to put more weight on the relevant signals sent throughout the array and to neglect the redundant or empty channels.
Speech-related applications deliver inferior performance in complex noise environments. Therefore, this study primarily addresses this problem by introducing speech-enhancement (SE) systems based on deep neural networks (DNNs) applied to a distributed microphone architecture, and then investigates the effectiveness of three different DNN-model structures. The first system constructs a DNN model for each microphone to enhance the recorded noisy speech signal, and the second system combines all the noisy recordings into a large feature structure that is then enhanced through a DNN model. As for the third system, a channel-dependent DNN is first used to enhance the corresponding noisy input, and all the channel-wise enhanced outputs are fed into a DNN fusion model to construct a nearly clean signal. All the three DNN SE systems are operated in the acoustic frequency domain of speech signals in a diffuse-noise field environment. Evaluation experiments were conducted on the Taiwan Mandarin Hearing in Noise Test (TMHINT) database, and the results indicate that all the three DNN-based SE systems provide the original noise-corrupted signals with improved speech quality and intelligibility, whereas the third system delivers the highest signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement and optimal speech intelligibility.
In this paper, we present a method for jointly-learning a microphone selection mechanism and a speech enhancement network for multi-channel speech enhancement with an ad-hoc microphone array. The attention-based microphone selection mechanism is trained to reduce communication-costs through a penalty term which represents a task-performance/ communication-cost trade-off. While working within the trade-off, our method can intelligently stream from more microphones in lower SNR scenes and fewer microphones in higher SNR scenes. We evaluate the model in complex echoic acoustic scenes with moving sources and show that it matches the performance of models that stream from a fixed number of microphones while reducing communication costs.
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