2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

6-11 June 2021 • Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Extracting Knowledge from Information

2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

6-11 June 2021 • Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Extracting Knowledge from Information

Technical Program

Paper Detail

Paper IDSPE-41.6
Paper Title Speech enhancement aided end-to-end multi-task learning for voice activity detection
Authors Xu Tan, Xiao-Lei Zhang, Northwestern Polytechnical University, China
SessionSPE-41: Voice Activity and Disfluency Detection
LocationGather.Town
Session Time:Thursday, 10 June, 15:30 - 16:15
Presentation Time:Thursday, 10 June, 15:30 - 16:15
Presentation Poster
Topic Speech Processing: [SPE-VAD] Voice Activity Detection and End-pointing
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Virtual Presentation  Click here to watch in the Virtual Conference
Abstract Robust voice activity detection (VAD) is a challenging task in low signal-to-noise (SNR) environments. Recent studies show that speech enhancement is helpful to VAD, but the performance improvement is limited. To address this issue, here we propose a speech enhancement aided end-to-end multi-task model for VAD. The model has two decoders, one for speech enhancement and the other for VAD. The two decoders share the same encoder and speech separation network. Unlike the direct thought that takes two separated objectives for VAD and speech enhancement respectively, here we propose a new joint optimization objective---VAD-masked scale-invariant source-to-noise ratio (mSI-SDR). mSI-SDR uses VAD information to mask the output of the speech enhancement decoder in the training process. It makes the VAD and speech enhancement tasks jointly optimized not only at the shared encoder and separation network, but also at the objective level. Experimental results show that the multi-task method significantly outperforms its single-task VAD counterpart. Moreover, mSI-SDR outperforms SI-SDR in the same multi-task setting. Finally, the model performs well in real-time conditions.