Isolating the voice of a specific person while filtering out other voices or background noises is challenging when video is shot in noisy environments, using a single microphone. For example, video conferences from home or office are disturbed by other voices, TV reporting from city streets is mixed with traffic noise, etc. We propose audio-visual methods to isolate the voice of a single speaker and eliminate unrelated sounds. Face motions captured in the video are used to estimate the speaker's voice, which is applied as a filter on the input audio. This approach avoids using mixtures of sounds in the learning process, as the number of such possible mixtures is huge, and would inevitably bias the trained model.
@cite_16: A major source of signal degradation in real environments is room reverberation. Monaural speech segregation in reverberant environments is a particularly challenging problem. Although inverse filtering has been proposed to partially restore the harmonicity of reverberant speech before segregation, this approach is sensitive to specific source receiver and room configurations. This paper proposes a supervised learning approach to monaural segregation of reverberant voiced speech, which learns to map from a set of pitch-based auditory features to a grouping cue encoding the posterior probability of a time-frequency (T-F) unit being target dominant given observed features. We devise a novel objective function for the learning process, which directly relates to the goal of maximizing signal-to-noise ratio. The models trained using this objective function yield significantly better T-F unit labeling. A segmentation and grouping framework is utilized to form reliable segments under reverberant conditions and organize them into streams. Systematic evaluations show that our approach produces very promising results under various reverberant conditions and generalizes well to new utterances and new speakers.
@cite_23: The problem of single-channel speaker separation attempts to extract a speech signal uttered by the speaker of interest from a signal containing a mixture of acoustic signals. Most algorithms that deal with this problem are based on masking, wherein unreliable frequency components from the mixed signal spectrogram are suppressed, and the reliable components are inverted to obtain the speech signal from speaker of interest. Most current techniques estimate this mask in a binary fashion, resulting in a hard mask. In this paper, we present two techniques to separate out the speech signal of the speaker of interest from a mixture of speech signals. One technique estimates all the spectral components of the desired speaker. The second technique estimates a soft mask that weights the frequency subbands of the mixed signal. In both cases, the speech signal of the speaker of interest is reconstructed from the complete spectral descriptions obtained. In their native form, these algorithms are computationally expensive. We also present fast factored approximations to the algorithms. Experiments reveal that the proposed algorithms can result in significant enhancement of individual speakers in mixed recordings, consistently achieving better performance than that obtained with hard binary masks.
@cite_17: 
* Audio-only speech enhancement and separation Previous methods for single-channel, or monaural, speech enhancement and separation mostly use audio only input. The common approach generates masking matrices containing time-frequency (TF) components dominated by each speaker @cite_23 @cite_16 . Huang @cite_17 are among the first to use a deep learning-based approach for speaker dependent speech separation.