No Arabic abstract
The intelligibility of speech severely degrades in the presence of environmental noise and reverberation. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning based system for modifying the speech signal to increase its intelligibility under the equal-power constraint, i.e., signal power before and after modification must be the same. To achieve this, we use generative adversarial networks (GANs) to obtain time-frequency dependent amplification factors, which are then applied to the input raw speech to reallocate the speech energy. Instead of optimizing only a single, simple metric, we train a deep neural network (DNN) model to simultaneously optimize multiple advanced speech metrics, including both intelligibility- and quality-related ones, which results in notable improvements in performance and robustness. Our system can not only work in non-realtime mode for offline audio playback but also support practical real-time speech applications. Experimental results using both objective measurements and subjective listening tests indicate that the proposed system significantly outperforms state-ofthe-art baseline systems under various noisy and reverberant listening conditions.
The intelligibility of natural speech is seriously degraded when exposed to adverse noisy environments. In this work, we propose a deep learning-based speech modification method to compensate for the intelligibility loss, with the constraint that the root mean square (RMS) level and duration of the speech signal are maintained before and after modifications. Specifically, we utilize an iMetricGAN approach to optimize the speech intelligibility metrics with generative adversarial networks (GANs). Experimental results show that the proposed iMetricGAN outperforms conventional state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of objective measures, i.e., speech intelligibility in bits (SIIB) and extended short-time objective intelligibility (ESTOI), under a Cafeteria noise condition. In addition, formal listening tests reveal significant intelligibility gains when both noise and reverberation exist.
The state-of-the-art in text-to-speech synthesis has recently improved considerably due to novel neural waveform generation methods, such as WaveNet. However, these methods suffer from their slow sequential inference process, while their parall
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
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.
In this paper, in order to further deal with the performance degradation caused by ignoring the phase information in conventional speech enhancement systems, we proposed a temporal dilated convolutional generative adversarial network (TDCGAN) in the end-to-end based speech enhancement architecture. For the first time, we introduced the temporal dilated convolutional network with depthwise separable convolutions into the GAN structure so that the receptive field can be greatly increased without increasing the number of parameters. We also first explored the effect of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) penalty item as regularization of the loss function of generator on improving the SNR of enhanced speech. The experimental results demonstrated that our proposed method outperformed the state-of-the-art end-to-end GAN-based speech enhancement. Moreover, compared with previous GAN-based methods, the proposed TDCGAN could greatly decreased the number of parameters. As expected, the work also demonstrated that the SNR penalty item as regularization was more effective than $L1$ on improving the SNR of enhanced speech.