On Generalization of Supervised Speech Separation

Résumé du livre

Noise segment generalization is desired for noise-dependent speech separation. When tested on the same noise type, a learning machine needs to generalize to unseen noise segments. For nonstationary noises, there exists a considerable mismatch between training and testing segments, which leads to poor performance during testing. We explore noise perturbation techniques to expand training noise for better generalization. Experiments show that frequency perturbation effectively reduces false-alarm errors in mask estimation and leads to improved objective metrics of speech intelligibility. Speech separation in unseen environments requires generalization to unseen noise types, not just noise segments. By exploring large-scale training, we find that a DNN based IRM estimator trained on a large variety of noises generalizes well to unseen noises. Even for highly nonstationary noises, the noise-independent model achieves similar performance as noise-dependent models in terms of objective speech intelligibility measures. Further experiments with human subjects lead to the first demonstration that supervised speech separation improves speech intelligibility for hearing-impaired listeners in novel noises. Besides noise generalization, speaker generalization is critical for many applications where target speech may be produced by an unseen speaker. We observe that training a DNN with many speakers leads to poor speaker generalization. The performance on seen speakers degrades as additional speakers are added for training. Such a DNN suffers from the confusion of target speech and interfering speech fragments embedded in noise. We propose a model based on recurrent neural network (RNN) with long short-term memory (LSTM) to incorporate the temporal dynamics of speech. We find that the trained LSTM keeps track of a target speaker and substantially improves speaker generalization over DNN. Experiments show that the proposed model generalizes to unseen noises, unseen SNRs and unseen speakers.