Voicing classification of visual speech using convolutional neural networks

The application of neural network and convolutional neural net- work (CNN) architectures is explored for the tasks of voicing classification (classifying frames as being either non-speech, unvoiced, or voiced) and voice activity detection (VAD) of vi- sual speech. Experiments are conducted for both speaker de- pendent and speaker independent scenarios. A Gaussian mixture model (GMM) baseline system is de- veloped using standard image-based two-dimensional discrete cosine transform (2D-DCT) visual speech features, achieving speaker dependent accuracies of 79% and 94%, for voicing classification and VAD respectively. Additionally, a single- layer neural network system trained using the same visual fea- tures achieves accuracies of 86 % and 97 %. A novel technique using convolutional neural networks for visual speech feature extraction and classification is presented. The voicing classifi- cation and VAD results using the system are further improved to 88 % and 98 % respectively. The speaker independent results show the neural network system to outperform both the GMM and CNN systems, achiev- ing accuracies of 63 % for voicing classification, and 79 % for voice activity detection

Two-Dimensional Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks for Speech Activity Detection

Speech Activity Detection (SAD) plays an important role in mobile communications and automatic speech recognition (ASR). Developing efficient SAD systems for real-world applications is a challenging task due to the presence of noise. We propose a new approach to SAD where we treat it as a two-dimensional multilabel image classification problem. To classify the audio segments, we compute their Short-time Fourier Transform spectrograms and classify them with a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN), traditionally used in image recognition. Our CRNN uses a sigmoid activation function, max-pooling in the frequency domain, and a convolutional operation as a moving average filter to remove misclassified spikes. On the development set of Task 1 of the 2019 Fearless Steps Challenge, our system achieved a decision cost function (DCF) of 2.89%, a 66.4% improvement over the baseline. Moreover, it achieved a DCF score of 3.318% on the evaluation dataset of the challenge, ranking first among all submissions

Exploring convolutional, recurrent, and hybrid deep neural networks for speech and music detection in a large audio dataset

Audio signals represent a wide diversity of acoustic events, from background environmental noise to spoken communication. Machine learning models such as neural networks have already been proposed for audio signal modeling, where recurrent structures can take advantage of temporal dependencies. This work aims to study the implementation of several neural network-based systems for speech and music event detection over a collection of 77,937 10-second audio segments (216 h), selected from the Google AudioSet dataset. These segments belong to YouTube videos and have been represented as mel-spectrograms. We propose and compare two approaches. The first one is the training of two different neural networks, one for speech detection and another for music detection. The second approach consists on training a single neural network to tackle both tasks at the same time. The studied architectures include fully connected, convolutional and LSTM (long short-term memory) recurrent networks. Comparative results are provided in terms of classification performance and model complexity. We would like to highlight the performance of convolutional architectures, specially in combination with an LSTM stage. The hybrid convolutional-LSTM models achieve the best overall results (85% accuracy) in the three proposed tasks. Furthermore, a distractor analysis of the results has been carried out in order to identify which events in the ontology are the most harmful for the performance of the models, showing some difficult scenarios for the detection of music and speechThis work has been supported by project “DSSL: Redes Profundas y Modelos de Subespacios para Deteccion y Seguimiento de Locutor, Idioma y Enfermedades Degenerativas a partir de la Voz” (TEC2015-68172-C2-1-P), funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitivity of Spain and FEDE

Extended Bit-Plane Compression for Convolutional Neural Network Accelerators

After the tremendous success of convolutional neural networks in image classification, object detection, speech recognition, etc., there is now rising demand for deployment of these compute-intensive ML models on tightly power constrained embedded and mobile systems at low cost as well as for pushing the throughput in data centers. This has triggered a wave of research towards specialized hardware accelerators. Their performance is often constrained by I/O bandwidth and the energy consumption is dominated by I/O transfers to off-chip memory. We introduce and evaluate a novel, hardware-friendly compression scheme for the feature maps present within convolutional neural networks. We show that an average compression ratio of 4.4x relative to uncompressed data and a gain of 60% over existing method can be achieved for ResNet-34 with a compression block requiring <300 bit of sequential cells and minimal combinational logic

Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks for Polyphonic Sound Event Detection

Sound events often occur in unstructured environments where they exhibit wide variations in their frequency content and temporal structure. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are able to extract higher level features that are invariant to local spectral and temporal variations. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are powerful in learning the longer term temporal context in the audio signals. CNNs and RNNs as classifiers have recently shown improved performances over established methods in various sound recognition tasks. We combine these two approaches in a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) and apply it on a polyphonic sound event detection task. We compare the performance of the proposed CRNN method with CNN, RNN, and other established methods, and observe a considerable improvement for four different datasets consisting of everyday sound events.Comment: Accepted for IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, Special Issue on Sound Scene and Event Analysi

Deep Learning for Audio Signal Processing

Given the recent surge in developments of deep learning, this article provides a review of the state-of-the-art deep learning techniques for audio signal processing. Speech, music, and environmental sound processing are considered side-by-side, in order to point out similarities and differences between the domains, highlighting general methods, problems, key references, and potential for cross-fertilization between areas. The dominant feature representations (in particular, log-mel spectra and raw waveform) and deep learning models are reviewed, including convolutional neural networks, variants of the long short-term memory architecture, as well as more audio-specific neural network models. Subsequently, prominent deep learning application areas are covered, i.e. audio recognition (automatic speech recognition, music information retrieval, environmental sound detection, localization and tracking) and synthesis and transformation (source separation, audio enhancement, generative models for speech, sound, and music synthesis). Finally, key issues and future questions regarding deep learning applied to audio signal processing are identified.Comment: 15 pages, 2 pdf figure