In many fields of research, labeled datasets are hard to acquire. This is where data augmentation promises to overcome the lack of training data in the context of neural network engineering and classification tasks. The idea here is to reduce model over-fitting to the feature distribution of a small under-descriptive training dataset. We try to evaluate such data augmentation techniques to gather insights in the performance boost they provide for several convolutional neural networks on mel-spectrogram representations of audio data. We show the impact of data augmentation on the binary classification task of surgical mask detection in samples of human voice (ComParE Challenge 2020). Also we consider four varying architectures to account for augmentation robustness. Results show that most of the baselines given by ComParE are outperformed.
In this paper, we present a novel system that separates the voice of a target speaker from multi-speaker signals, by making use of a reference signal from the target speaker. We achieve this by training two separate neural networks: (1) A speaker recognition network that produces speaker-discriminative embeddings; (2) A spectrogram masking network that takes both noisy spectrogram and speaker embedding as input, and produces a mask. Our system significantly reduces the speech recognition WER on multi-speaker signals, with minimal WER degradation on single-speaker signals.
Transformer-based models attain excellent results and generalize well when trained on sufficient amounts of data. However, constrained by the limited data available in the audio domain, most transformer-based models for audio tasks are finetuned from pre-trained models in other domains (e.g. image), which has a notable gap with the audio domain. Other methods explore the self-supervised learning approaches directly in the audio domain but currently do not perform well in the downstream tasks. In this paper, we present a novel self-supervised learning method for transformer-based audio models, …
Recently, phase processing is attracting increasinginterest in speech enhancement community. Some researchersintegrate phase estimations module into speech enhancementmodels by using complex-valued short-time Fourier transform(STFT) spectrogram based training targets, e.g. Complex RatioMask (cRM) [1]. However, masking on spectrogram would violentits consistency constraints. In this work, we prove that theinconsistent problem enlarges the solution space of the speechenhancement model and causes unintended artifacts. ConsistencySpectrogram Masking (CSM) is proposed to estimate the complexspectro…
NTT Communication Science Laboratories（NTT通信科学实验室）；NTT Corporation（NTT公司）
Recent general-purpose audio representations show state-of-the-art performance on various audio tasks. These representations are pre-trained by self-supervised learning methods that create training signals from the input. For example, typical audio contrastive learning uses temporal relationships among input sounds to create training signals, whereas some methods use a difference among input views created by data augmentations. However, these training signals do not provide information derived from the intact input sound, which we think is suboptimal for learning representation that describes …
An overview of neural architectures for self-supervised audio representation learning from masked spectrograms
Department of Electronic Systems, Aalborg University（电子系统系，奥尔堡大学）；Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence（人工智能先锋中心）；National and Kapodistrian University of Athens（雅典国家与卡波蒂斯坦大学）
Challenges based on Computational Paralinguistics in the INTERSPEECH Conference have always had a good reception among the attendees owing to its competitive academic and research demands. This year, the INTERSPEECH 2020 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge offers three different problems; here, the Mask Sub-Challenge is of specific interest. This challenge involves the classification of speech recorded from subjects while wearing a surgical mask. In this study, to address the above-mentioned problem we employ two different types of feature extraction methods. The x-vectors embeddings, whic…
MTA-SZTE Research Group on Artificial Intelligence（MTA-SZTE人工智能研究组）；University of Szeged（塞格德大学）
The 2020 INTERSPEECH Computational Paralinguistics Challenge (ComParE) consists of three Sub-Challenges, where the tasks are to identify the level of arousal and valence of elderly speakers, determine whether the actual speaker wearing a surgical mask, and estimate the actual breathing of the speaker. In our contribution to the Challenge, we focus on the Elderly Emotion and the Mask sub-challenges. Besides utilizing standard or close-to-standard features such as ComParE functionals, Bag-of-Audio-Words and Fisher vectors, we exploit that emotion is related to the velocity of speech (i.e. speech…
This technical report describes Chung-Ang University and Korea University (CAU_KU) team's model participating in the Audio Deep Synthesis Detection (ADD) 2022 Challenge, track 1: Low-quality fake audio detection. For track 1, we propose a frequency feature masking (FFM) augmentation technique to deal with a low-quality audio environment. %detection that spectrogram-based models can be applied. We applied FFM and mixup augmentation on five spectrogram-based deep neural network architectures that performed well for spoofing detection using mel-spectrogram and constant Q transform (CQT) features.…
LMD: A Learnable Mask Network to Detect Adversarial Examples for Speaker Verification
School of Marine Science and Technology, Northwestern Polytechnical University（海洋科学与技术学院，西北工业大学）；Research & Development Institute of Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学研发院）；Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University（电子工程系，清华大学）；Ocean Institute of Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学海洋学院）
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳-雷焦艾米利亚大学）；Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）
In this paper, we address the problem of enhancing the speech of a speaker of interest in a cocktail party scenario when visual information of the speaker of interest is available. Contrary to most previous studies, we do not learn visual features on the typically small audio-visual datasets, but use an already available face landmark detector (trained on a separate image dataset). The landmarks are used by LSTM-based models to generate time-frequency masks which are applied to the acoustic mixed-speech spectrogram. Results show that: (i) landmark motion features are very effective features fo…
Graduate School of Culture Technology, KAIST（韩国科学技术院文化技术研究生院）
Singing voice separation (SVS) is a task that separates singing voice audio from its mixture with instrumental audio. Previous SVS studies have mainly employed the spectrogram masking method which requires a large dimensionality in predicting the binary masks. In addition, they focused on extracting a vocal stem that retains the wet sound with the reverberation effect. This result may hinder the reusability of the isolated singing voice. This paper addresses the issues by predicting mel-spectrogram of dry singing voices from the mixed audio as neural vocoder features and synthesizing the singi…
This paper proposes a deep neural network (DNN)-based multi-channel speech enhancement system in which a DNN is trained to maximize the quality of the enhanced time-domain signal. DNN-based multi-channel speech enhancement is often conducted in the time-frequency (T-F) domain because spatial filtering can be efficiently implemented in the T-F domain. In such a case, ordinary objective functions are computed on the estimated T-F mask or spectrogram. However, the estimated spectrogram is often inconsistent, and its amplitude and phase may change when the spectrogram is converted back to the time…
University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Vector Institute for AI（Vector人工智能研究所）
Learning how to localize and separate individual object sounds in the audio channel of the video is a difficult task. Current state-of-the-art methods predict audio masks from artificially mixed spectrograms, known as Mix-and-Separate framework. We propose an audio-visual co-segmentation, where the network learns both what individual objects look and sound like, from videos labeled with only object labels. Unlike other recent visually-guided audio source separation frameworks, our architecture can be learned in an end-to-end manner and requires no additional supervision or bounding box proposa…
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；Institute for High Performance Computing, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局高性能计算研究所）
Separating a singing voice from its music accompaniment remains an important challenge in the field of music information retrieval. We present a unique neural network approach inspired by a technique that has revolutionized the field of vision: pixel-wise image classification, which we combine with cross entropy loss and pretraining of the CNN as an autoencoder on singing voice spectrograms. The pixel-wise classification technique directly estimates the sound source label for each time-frequency (T-F) bin in our spectrogram image, thus eliminating common pre- and postprocessing tasks. The prop…
Automatic speech emotion recognition (SER) is a challenging task that plays a crucial role in natural human-computer interaction. One of the main challenges in SER is data scarcity, i.e., insufficient amounts of carefully labeled data to build and fully explore complex deep learning models for emotion classification. This paper aims to address this challenge using a transfer learning strategy combined with spectrogram augmentation. Specifically, we propose a transfer learning approach that leverages a pre-trained residual network (ResNet) model including a statistics pooling layer from speaker…
Technological Educational Institute of Crete（克里特技术教育学院）
This work focuses on reliable detection and segmentation of bird vocalizations as recorded in the open field. Acoustic detection of avian sounds can be used for the automatized monitoring of multiple bird taxa and querying in long-term recordings for species of interest. These tasks are tackled in this work, by suggesting two approaches: A) First, DenseNets are applied to weekly labeled data to infer the attention map of the dataset (i.e. Salience and CAM). We push further this idea by directing attention maps to the YOLO v2 Deepnet-based, detection framework to localize bird vocalizations. B)…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）
The performance of single channel source separation algorithms has improved greatly in recent times with the development and deployment of neural networks. However, many such networks continue to operate on the magnitude spectrogram of a mixture, and produce an estimate of source magnitude spectrograms, to perform source separation. In this paper, we interpret these steps as additional neural network layers and propose an end-to-end source separation network that allows us to estimate the separated speech waveform by operating directly on the raw waveform of the mixture. Furthermore, we also p…
Multi-Representation Attention Framework for Underwater Bioacoustic Denoising and Recognition
MILA – Quebec AI Institute（魁北克人工智能研究所）；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；Université du Québec à Rimouski（里莫斯基大学）；ISMER（ISMER机构）；Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎高等理工学院）
University Politehnica of Bucharest（布加勒斯特理工大学）；University of Bucharest（布加勒斯特大学）
The task of detecting whether a person wears a face mask from speech is useful in modelling speech in forensic investigations, communication between surgeons or people protecting themselves against infectious diseases such as COVID-19. In this paper, we propose a novel data augmentation approach for mask detection from speech. Our approach is based on (i) training Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with cycle-consistency loss to translate unpaired utterances between two classes (with mask and without mask), and on (ii) generating new training utterances using the cycle-consistent GANs, ass…
The ConditionaL Neural Network (CLNN) exploits the nature of the temporal sequencing of the sound signal represented in a spectrogram, and its variant the Masked ConditionaL Neural Network (MCLNN) induces the network to learn in frequency bands by embedding a filterbank-like sparseness over the network's links using a binary mask. Additionally, the masking automates the exploration of different feature combinations concurrently analogous to handcrafting the optimum combination of features for a recognition task. We have evaluated the MCLNN performance using the Urbansound8k dataset of environm…
Automatic feature extraction using neural networks has accomplished remarkable success for images, but for sound recognition, these models are usually modified to fit the nature of the multi-dimensional temporal representation of the audio signal in spectrograms. This may not efficiently harness the time-frequency representation of the signal. The ConditionaL Neural Network (CLNN) takes into consideration the interrelation between the temporal frames, and the Masked ConditionaL Neural Network (MCLNN) extends upon the CLNN by forcing a systematic sparseness over the network's weights using a bi…
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）
Recently, neural networks based purely on self-attention, such as the Vision Transformer (ViT), have been shown to outperform deep learning models constructed with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on various vision tasks, thus extending the success of Transformers, which were originally developed for language processing, to the vision domain. A recent study showed that a similar methodology can also be applied to the audio domain. Specifically, the Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST) achieves state-of-the-art results on various audio classification benchmarks. However, pure Transformer mod…
MDD: a Mask Diffusion Detector to Protect Speaker Verification Systems from Adversarial Perturbations
EURECOM；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI)（人工智能研究所）；China Telecom Corp Ltd（中国电信有限公司）
