2021/10/30 by Yousefi, Midia, Hansen, John H. L. · 1 citation
#Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Sound (cs.SD) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2111.00316
Most current speech technology systems are designed to operate well even in the presence of multiple active speakers. However, most solutions assume that the number of co-current speakers is known. Unfortunately, this information might not always be available in real-world applications. In this study, we propose a real-time, single-channel attention-guided Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to estimate the number of active speakers in overlapping speech. The proposed system extracts higher-level information from the speech spectral content using a CNN model. Next, the attention mechanism summarizes the extracted information into a compact feature vector without losing critical information. Finally, the active speakers are classified using a fully connected network. Experiments on simulated overlapping speech using WSJ corpus show that the attention solution is shown to improve the performance by almost 3% absolute over conventional temporal average pooling. The proposed Attention-guided CNN achieves 76.15% for both Weighted Accuracy and average Recall, and 75.80% Precision on speech segments as short as 20 frames (i.e., 200 ms). All the classification metrics exceed 92% for the attention-guided model in offline scenarios where the input signal is more than 100 frames long (i.e., 1s).