12,753 research outputs found
Block-Online Multi-Channel Speech Enhancement Using DNN-Supported Relative Transfer Function Estimates
This work addresses the problem of block-online processing for multi-channel
speech enhancement. Such processing is vital in scenarios with moving speakers
and/or when very short utterances are processed, e.g., in voice assistant
scenarios. We consider several variants of a system that performs beamforming
supported by DNN-based voice activity detection (VAD) followed by
post-filtering. The speaker is targeted through estimating relative transfer
functions between microphones. Each block of the input signals is processed
independently in order to make the method applicable in highly dynamic
environments. Owing to the short length of the processed block, the statistics
required by the beamformer are estimated less precisely. The influence of this
inaccuracy is studied and compared to the processing regime when recordings are
treated as one block (batch processing). The experimental evaluation of the
proposed method is performed on large datasets of CHiME-4 and on another
dataset featuring moving target speaker. The experiments are evaluated in terms
of objective and perceptual criteria (such as signal-to-interference ratio
(SIR) or perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ), respectively).
Moreover, word error rate (WER) achieved by a baseline automatic speech
recognition system is evaluated, for which the enhancement method serves as a
front-end solution. The results indicate that the proposed method is robust
with respect to short length of the processed block. Significant improvements
in terms of the criteria and WER are observed even for the block length of 250
ms.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables. Modified version of the article
accepted for publication in IET Signal Processing journal. Original results
unchanged, additional experiments presented, refined discussion and
conclusion
Speaker recognition using frequency filtered spectral energies
The spectral parameters that result from filtering the
frequency sequence of log mel-scaled filter-bank energies
with a simple first or second order FIR filter have proved
to be an efficient speech representation in terms of both
speech recognition rate and computational load. Recently,
the authors have shown that this frequency filtering can
approximately equalize the cepstrum variance enhancing
the oscillations of the spectral envelope curve that are
most effective for discrimination between speakers. Even
better speaker identification results than using melcepstrum
have been obtained on the TIMIT database,
especially when white noise was added. On the other
hand, the hybridization of both linear prediction and
filter-bank spectral analysis using either cepstral
transformation or the alternative frequency filtering has
been explored for speaker verification. The combination
of hybrid spectral analysis and frequency filtering, that
had shown to be able to outperform the conventional
techniques in clean and noisy word recognition, has yield
good text-dependent speaker verification results on the
new speaker-oriented telephone-line POLYCOST
database.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Deep Learning for Environmentally Robust Speech Recognition: An Overview of Recent Developments
Eliminating the negative effect of non-stationary environmental noise is a
long-standing research topic for automatic speech recognition that stills
remains an important challenge. Data-driven supervised approaches, including
ones based on deep neural networks, have recently emerged as potential
alternatives to traditional unsupervised approaches and with sufficient
training, can alleviate the shortcomings of the unsupervised methods in various
real-life acoustic environments. In this light, we review recently developed,
representative deep learning approaches for tackling non-stationary additive
and convolutional degradation of speech with the aim of providing guidelines
for those involved in the development of environmentally robust speech
recognition systems. We separately discuss single- and multi-channel techniques
developed for the front-end and back-end of speech recognition systems, as well
as joint front-end and back-end training frameworks
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