No Arabic abstract
The discrepancy between the cost function used for training a speech enhancement model and human auditory perception usually makes the quality of enhanced speech unsatisfactory. Objective evaluation metrics which consider human perception can hence serve as a bridge to reduce the gap. Our previously proposed MetricGAN was designed to optimize objective metrics by connecting the metric with a discriminator. Because only the scores of the target evaluation functions are needed during training, the metrics can even be non-differentiable. In this study, we propose a MetricGAN+ in which three training techniques incorporating domain-knowledge of speech processing are proposed. With these techniques, experimental results on the VoiceBank-DEMAND dataset show that MetricGAN+ can increase PESQ score by 0.3 compared to the previous MetricGAN and achieve state-of-the-art results (PESQ score = 3.15).
Adversarial loss in a conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) is not designed to directly optimize evaluation metrics of a target task, and thus, may not always guide the generator in a GAN to generate data with improved metric scores. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel MetricGAN approach with an aim to optimize the generator with respect to one or multiple evaluation metrics. Moreover, based on MetricGAN, the metric scores of the generated data can also be arbitrarily specified by users. We tested the proposed MetricGAN on a speech enhancement task, which is particularly suitable to verify the proposed approach because there are multiple metrics measuring different aspects of speech signals. Moreover, these metrics are generally complex and could not be fully optimized by Lp or conventional adversarial losses.
The Transformer architecture has demonstrated a superior ability compared to recurrent neural networks in many different natural language processing applications. Therefore, our study applies a modified Transformer in a speech enhancement task. Specifically, positional encoding in the Transformer may not be necessary for speech enhancement, and hence, it is replaced by convolutional layers. To further improve the perceptual evaluation of the speech quality (PESQ) scores of enhanced speech, the L_1 pre-trained Transformer is fine-tuned using a MetricGAN framework. The proposed MetricGAN can be treated as a general post-processing module to further boost the objective scores of interest. The experiments were conducted using the data sets provided by the organizer of the Deep Noise Suppression (DNS) challenge. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed system outperformed the challenge baseline, in both subjective and objective evaluations, with a large margin.
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.
Cycle-consistent generative adversarial networks (CycleGAN) have shown their promising performance for speech enhancement (SE), while one intractable shortcoming of these CycleGAN-based SE systems is that the noise components propagate throughout the cycle and cannot be completely eliminated. Additionally, conventional CycleGAN-based SE systems only estimate the spectral magnitude, while the phase is unaltered. Motivated by the multi-stage learning concept, we propose a novel two-stage denoising system that combines a CycleGAN-based magnitude enhancing network and a subsequent complex spectral refining network in this paper. Specifically, in the first stage, a CycleGAN-based model is responsible for only estimating magnitude, which is subsequently coupled with the original noisy phase to obtain a coarsely enhanced complex spectrum. After that, the second stage is applied to further suppress the residual noise components and estimate the clean phase by a complex spectral mapping network, which is a pure complex-valued network composed of complex 2D convolution/deconvolution and complex temporal-frequency attention blocks. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently surpasses previous one-stage CycleGANs and other state-of-the-art SE systems in terms of various evaluation metrics, especially in background noise suppression.
In this paper, we propose the coarse-to-fine optimization for the task of speech enhancement. Cosine similarity loss [1] has proven to be an effective metric to measure similarity of speech signals. However, due to the large variance of the enhanced speech with even the same cosine similarity loss in high dimensional space, a deep neural network learnt with this loss might not be able to predict enhanced speech with good quality. Our coarse-to-fine strategy optimizes the cosine similarity loss for different granularities so that more constraints are added to the prediction from high dimension to relatively low dimension. In this way, the enhanced speech will better resemble the clean speech. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed coarse-to-fine optimization in both discriminative models and generative models. Moreover, we apply the coarse-to-fine strategy to the adversarial loss in generative adversarial network (GAN) and propose dynamic perceptual loss, which dynamically computes the adversarial loss from coarse resolution to fine resolution. Dynamic perceptual loss further improves the accuracy and achieves state-of-the-art results compared with other generative models.