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

Perfect match: Improved cross-modal embeddings for audio-visual synchronisation

This paper proposes a new strategy for learning powerful cross-modal embeddings for audio-to-video synchronization. Here, we set up the problem as one of cross-modal retrieval, where the objective is to find the most relevant audio segment given a short video clip. The method builds on the recent advances in learning representations from cross-modal self-supervision. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: (1) we propose a new learning strategy where the embeddings are learnt via a multi-way matching problem, as opposed to a binary classification (matching or non-matching) problem as proposed by recent papers; (2) we demonstrate that performance of this method far exceeds the existing baselines on the synchronization task; (3) we use the learnt embeddings for visual speech recognition in self-supervision, and show that the performance matches the representations learnt end-to-end in a fully-supervised manner.Comment: Preprint. Work in progres

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

MIRNet: Learning multiple identities representations in overlapped speech

Many approaches can derive information about a single speaker's identity from the speech by learning to recognize consistent characteristics of acoustic parameters. However, it is challenging to determine identity information when there are multiple concurrent speakers in a given signal. In this paper, we propose a novel deep speaker representation strategy that can reliably extract multiple speaker identities from an overlapped speech. We design a network that can extract a high-level embedding that contains information about each speaker's identity from a given mixture. Unlike conventional approaches that need reference acoustic features for training, our proposed algorithm only requires the speaker identity labels of the overlapped speech segments. We demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of our algorithm in a speaker verification task and a speech separation system conditioned on the target speaker embeddings obtained through the proposed method.Comment: Accepted in Interspeech 202

AILTTS: Adversarial Learning of Intermediate Acoustic Feature for End-to-End Lightweight Text-to-Speech

The quality of end-to-end neural text-to-speech (TTS) systems highly depends on the reliable estimation of intermediate acoustic features from text inputs. To reduce the complexity of the speech generation process, several non-autoregressive TTS systems directly find a mapping relationship between text and waveforms. However, the generation quality of these system is unsatisfactory due to the difficulty in modeling the dynamic nature of prosodic information. In this paper, we propose an effective prosody predictor that successfully replicates the characteristics of prosodic features extracted from mel-spectrograms. Specifically, we introduce a generative model-based conditional discriminator to enable the estimated embeddings have highly informative prosodic features, which significantly enhances the expressiveness of generated speech. Since the estimated embeddings obtained by the proposed method are highly correlated with acoustic features, the time-alignment of input texts and intermediate features is greatly simplified, which results in faster convergence. Our proposed model outperforms several publicly available models based on various objective and subjective evaluation metrics, even using a relatively small number of parameters.Comment: Submitted to INTERSPEECH 202