A General Unfolding Speech Enhancement Method Motivated by Taylor's Theorem

While deep neural networks have facilitated significant advancements in the field of speech enhancement, most existing methods are developed following either empirical or relatively blind criteria, lacking adequate guidelines in pipeline design. Inspired by Taylor's theorem, we propose a general unfolding framework for both single- and multi-channel speech enhancement tasks. Concretely, we formulate the complex spectrum recovery into the spectral magnitude mapping in the neighborhood space of the noisy mixture, in which an unknown sparse term is introduced and applied for phase modification in advance. Based on that, the mapping function is decomposed into the superimposition of the 0th-order and high-order polynomials in Taylor's series, where the former coarsely removes the interference in the magnitude domain and the latter progressively complements the remaining spectral detail in the complex spectrum domain. In addition, we study the relation between adjacent order terms and reveal that each high-order term can be recursively estimated with its lower-order term, and each high-order term is then proposed to evaluate using a surrogate function with trainable weights so that the whole system can be trained in an end-to-end manner. Given that the proposed framework is devised based on Taylor's theorem, it possesses improved internal flexibility. Extensive experiments are conducted on WSJ0-SI84, DNS-Challenge, Voicebank+Demand, spatialized Librispeech, and L3DAS22 multi-channel speech enhancement challenge datasets. Quantitative results show that the proposed approach yields competitive performance over existing top-performing approaches in terms of multiple objective metrics.Comment: Submitted to TASLP, revised version, 17 page

CLIPC8: Face liveness detection algorithm based on image-text pairs and contrastive learning

Face recognition technology is widely used in the financial field, and various types of liveness attack behaviors need to be addressed. Existing liveness detection algorithms are trained on specific training datasets and tested on testing datasets, but their performance and robustness in transferring to unseen datasets are relatively poor. To tackle this issue, we propose a face liveness detection method based on image-text pairs and contrastive learning, dividing liveness attack problems in the financial field into eight categories and using text information to describe the images of these eight types of attacks. The text encoder and image encoder are used to extract feature vector representations for the classification description text and face images, respectively. By maximizing the similarity of positive samples and minimizing the similarity of negative samples, the model learns shared representations between images and texts. The proposed method is capable of effectively detecting specific liveness attack behaviors in certain scenarios, such as those occurring in dark environments or involving the tampering of ID card photos. Additionally, it is also effective in detecting traditional liveness attack methods, such as printing photo attacks and screen remake attacks. The zero-shot capabilities of face liveness detection on five public datasets, including NUAA, CASIA-FASD, Replay-Attack, OULU-NPU and MSU-MFSD also reaches the level of commercial algorithms. The detection capability of proposed algorithm was verified on 5 types of testing datasets, and the results show that the method outperformed commercial algorithms, and the detection rates reached 100% on multiple datasets. Demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of introducing image-text pairs and contrastive learning into liveness detection tasks as proposed in this paper

Bus bunching along a corridor served by two lines

Headway fluctuations and “bus bunching” are well known phenomena on many bus routes where an initial delay to one service can disturb the whole schedule due to resulting differences in dwell times of subsequent buses at stops. This paper deals with the influence of a frequent but so far largely neglected characteristic of bus networks on bus bunching, that is the presence of overtaking and common lines. A set of discrete state equations is implemented to obtain the departure times of a group of buses following the occurrence of an exogenous delay to one bus at a bus stop. Two models are distinguished depending on whether overtaking at stops is possible or not. If two buses board simultaneously and overtaking is not possible, passengers will board the front bus. If overtaking is possible, passengers form equilibrium queues in order to minimise their waiting times. Conditions for equilibrium queues among passengers with different choice sets are formulated. With a case study we then illustrate that, if overtaking is not allowed, the presence of common lines worsens the service regularity along the corridor. Conversely, common lines have positive effects when overtaking is possible. We suggest hence that appropriate network design is important to reduce the negative effects of delay-prone lines on the overall network performance