55,502 research outputs found
Multi-Input Multi-Output Target-Speaker Voice Activity Detection For Unified, Flexible, and Robust Audio-Visual Speaker Diarization
Audio-visual learning has demonstrated promising results in many classical
speech tasks (e.g., speech separation, automatic speech recognition, wake-word
spotting). We believe that introducing visual modality will also benefit
speaker diarization. To date, Target-Speaker Voice Activity Detection (TS-VAD)
plays an important role in highly accurate speaker diarization. However,
previous TS-VAD models take audio features and utilize the speaker's acoustic
footprint to distinguish his or her personal speech activities, which is easily
affected by overlapped speech in multi-speaker scenarios. Although visual
information naturally tolerates overlapped speech, it suffers from spatial
occlusion, low resolution, etc. The potential modality-missing problem blocks
TS-VAD towards an audio-visual approach.
This paper proposes a novel Multi-Input Multi-Output Target-Speaker Voice
Activity Detection (MIMO-TSVAD) framework for speaker diarization. The proposed
method can take audio-visual input and leverage the speaker's acoustic
footprint or lip track to flexibly conduct audio-based, video-based, and
audio-visual speaker diarization in a unified sequence-to-sequence framework.
Experimental results show that the MIMO-TSVAD framework demonstrates
state-of-the-art performance on the VoxConverse, DIHARD-III, and MISP 2022
datasets under corresponding evaluation metrics, obtaining the Diarization
Error Rates (DERs) of 4.18%, 10.10%, and 8.15%, respectively. In addition, it
can perform robustly in heavy lip-missing scenarios.Comment: Under review of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language
Processin
Seeing voices and hearing voices: learning discriminative embeddings using cross-modal self-supervision
The goal of this work is to train discriminative cross-modal embeddings
without access to manually annotated data. Recent advances in self-supervised
learning have shown that effective representations can be learnt from natural
cross-modal synchrony. We build on earlier work to train embeddings that are
more discriminative for uni-modal downstream tasks. To this end, we propose a
novel training strategy that not only optimises metrics across modalities, but
also enforces intra-class feature separation within each of the modalities. The
effectiveness of the method is demonstrated on two downstream tasks: lip
reading using the features trained on audio-visual synchronisation, and speaker
recognition using the features trained for cross-modal biometric matching. The
proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art self-supervised baselines by a
signficant margin.Comment: Under submission as a conference pape
FaceFilter: Audio-visual speech separation using still images
The objective of this paper is to separate a target speaker's speech from a
mixture of two speakers using a deep audio-visual speech separation network.
Unlike previous works that used lip movement on video clips or pre-enrolled
speaker information as an auxiliary conditional feature, we use a single face
image of the target speaker. In this task, the conditional feature is obtained
from facial appearance in cross-modal biometric task, where audio and visual
identity representations are shared in latent space. Learnt identities from
facial images enforce the network to isolate matched speakers and extract the
voices from mixed speech. It solves the permutation problem caused by swapped
channel outputs, frequently occurred in speech separation tasks. The proposed
method is far more practical than video-based speech separation since user
profile images are readily available on many platforms. Also, unlike
speaker-aware separation methods, it is applicable on separation with unseen
speakers who have never been enrolled before. We show strong qualitative and
quantitative results on challenging real-world examples.Comment: Under submission as a conference paper. Video examples:
https://youtu.be/ku9xoLh62
End-to-end Audiovisual Speech Activity Detection with Bimodal Recurrent Neural Models
Speech activity detection (SAD) plays an important role in current speech
processing systems, including automatic speech recognition (ASR). SAD is
particularly difficult in environments with acoustic noise. A practical
solution is to incorporate visual information, increasing the robustness of the
SAD approach. An audiovisual system has the advantage of being robust to
different speech modes (e.g., whisper speech) or background noise. Recent
advances in audiovisual speech processing using deep learning have opened
opportunities to capture in a principled way the temporal relationships between
acoustic and visual features. This study explores this idea proposing a
\emph{bimodal recurrent neural network} (BRNN) framework for SAD. The approach
models the temporal dynamic of the sequential audiovisual data, improving the
accuracy and robustness of the proposed SAD system. Instead of estimating
hand-crafted features, the study investigates an end-to-end training approach,
where acoustic and visual features are directly learned from the raw data
during training. The experimental evaluation considers a large audiovisual
corpus with over 60.8 hours of recordings, collected from 105 speakers. The
results demonstrate that the proposed framework leads to absolute improvements
up to 1.2% under practical scenarios over a VAD baseline using only audio
implemented with deep neural network (DNN). The proposed approach achieves
92.7% F1-score when it is evaluated using the sensors from a portable tablet
under noisy acoustic environment, which is only 1.0% lower than the performance
obtained under ideal conditions (e.g., clean speech obtained with a high
definition camera and a close-talking microphone).Comment: Submitted to Speech Communicatio
Symbolic inductive bias for visually grounded learning of spoken language
A widespread approach to processing spoken language is to first automatically
transcribe it into text. An alternative is to use an end-to-end approach:
recent works have proposed to learn semantic embeddings of spoken language from
images with spoken captions, without an intermediate transcription step. We
propose to use multitask learning to exploit existing transcribed speech within
the end-to-end setting. We describe a three-task architecture which combines
the objectives of matching spoken captions with corresponding images, speech
with text, and text with images. We show that the addition of the speech/text
task leads to substantial performance improvements on image retrieval when
compared to training the speech/image task in isolation. We conjecture that
this is due to a strong inductive bias transcribed speech provides to the
model, and offer supporting evidence for this.Comment: ACL 201
Towards Automatic Speech Identification from Vocal Tract Shape Dynamics in Real-time MRI
Vocal tract configurations play a vital role in generating distinguishable
speech sounds, by modulating the airflow and creating different resonant
cavities in speech production. They contain abundant information that can be
utilized to better understand the underlying speech production mechanism. As a
step towards automatic mapping of vocal tract shape geometry to acoustics, this
paper employs effective video action recognition techniques, like Long-term
Recurrent Convolutional Networks (LRCN) models, to identify different
vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) sequences from dynamic shaping of the vocal tract.
Such a model typically combines a CNN based deep hierarchical visual feature
extractor with Recurrent Networks, that ideally makes the network
spatio-temporally deep enough to learn the sequential dynamics of a short video
clip for video classification tasks. We use a database consisting of 2D
real-time MRI of vocal tract shaping during VCV utterances by 17 speakers. The
comparative performances of this class of algorithms under various parameter
settings and for various classification tasks are discussed. Interestingly, the
results show a marked difference in the model performance in the context of
speech classification with respect to generic sequence or video classification
tasks.Comment: To appear in the INTERSPEECH 2018 Proceeding
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