24,133 research outputs found
Seeing Through Noise: Visually Driven Speaker Separation and Enhancement
Isolating the voice of a specific person while filtering out other voices or
background noises is challenging when video is shot in noisy environments. We
propose audio-visual methods to isolate the voice of a single speaker and
eliminate unrelated sounds. First, face motions captured in the video are used
to estimate the speaker's voice, by passing the silent video frames through a
video-to-speech neural network-based model. Then the speech predictions are
applied as a filter on the noisy input audio. This approach avoids using
mixtures of sounds in the learning process, as the number of such possible
mixtures is huge, and would inevitably bias the trained model. We evaluate our
method on two audio-visual datasets, GRID and TCD-TIMIT, and show that our
method attains significant SDR and PESQ improvements over the raw
video-to-speech predictions, and a well-known audio-only method.Comment: Supplementary video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmsyj7vAzo
Multi-talker Speech Separation with Utterance-level Permutation Invariant Training of Deep Recurrent Neural Networks
In this paper we propose the utterance-level Permutation Invariant Training
(uPIT) technique. uPIT is a practically applicable, end-to-end, deep learning
based solution for speaker independent multi-talker speech separation.
Specifically, uPIT extends the recently proposed Permutation Invariant Training
(PIT) technique with an utterance-level cost function, hence eliminating the
need for solving an additional permutation problem during inference, which is
otherwise required by frame-level PIT. We achieve this using Recurrent Neural
Networks (RNNs) that, during training, minimize the utterance-level separation
error, hence forcing separated frames belonging to the same speaker to be
aligned to the same output stream. In practice, this allows RNNs, trained with
uPIT, to separate multi-talker mixed speech without any prior knowledge of
signal duration, number of speakers, speaker identity or gender. We evaluated
uPIT on the WSJ0 and Danish two- and three-talker mixed-speech separation tasks
and found that uPIT outperforms techniques based on Non-negative Matrix
Factorization (NMF) and Computational Auditory Scene Analysis (CASA), and
compares favorably with Deep Clustering (DPCL) and the Deep Attractor Network
(DANet). Furthermore, we found that models trained with uPIT generalize well to
unseen speakers and languages. Finally, we found that a single model, trained
with uPIT, can handle both two-speaker, and three-speaker speech mixtures
Bitwise Source Separation on Hashed Spectra: An Efficient Posterior Estimation Scheme Using Partial Rank Order Metrics
This paper proposes an efficient bitwise solution to the single-channel
source separation task. Most dictionary-based source separation algorithms rely
on iterative update rules during the run time, which becomes computationally
costly especially when we employ an overcomplete dictionary and sparse encoding
that tend to give better separation results. To avoid such cost we propose a
bitwise scheme on hashed spectra that leads to an efficient posterior
probability calculation. For each source, the algorithm uses a partial rank
order metric to extract robust features that form a binarized dictionary of
hashed spectra. Then, for a mixture spectrum, its hash code is compared with
each source's hashed dictionary in one pass. This simple voting-based
dictionary search allows a fast and iteration-free estimation of ratio masking
at each bin of a signal spectrogram. We verify that the proposed BitWise Source
Separation (BWSS) algorithm produces sensible source separation results for the
single-channel speech denoising task, with 6-8 dB mean SDR. To our knowledge,
this is the first dictionary based algorithm for this task that is completely
iteration-free in both training and testing
Speaker-normalized sound representations in the human auditory cortex
The acoustic dimensions that distinguish speech sounds (like the vowel differences in “boot” and “boat”) also differentiate speakers’ voices. Therefore, listeners must normalize across speakers without losing linguistic information. Past behavioral work suggests an important role for auditory contrast enhancement in normalization: preceding context affects listeners’ perception of subsequent speech sounds. Here, using intracranial electrocorticography in humans, we investigate whether and how such context effects arise in auditory cortex. Participants identified speech sounds that were preceded by phrases from two different speakers whose voices differed along the same acoustic dimension as target words (the lowest resonance of the vocal tract). In every participant, target vowels evoke a speaker-dependent neural response that is consistent with the listener’s perception, and which follows from a contrast enhancement model. Auditory cortex processing thus displays a critical feature of normalization, allowing listeners to extract meaningful content from the voices of diverse speakers
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