Binaural and log-power spectra features with deep neural networks for speech-noise separation
Alfredo Zermini, Qingju Liu, Yong Xu, Mark D. Plumbley, Dave Betts, Wenwu Wang · 2017
Binaural features of interaural level difference and interaural phase difference have proved to be very effective in training deep neural networks (DNNs), to generate time-frequency masks for target speech extraction in speech-speech mixtures. However, effectiveness of binaural features is reduced in more common speech-noise scenarios, since the noise may over-shadow the speech in adverse conditions. In addition, the reverberation also decreases the sparsity of binaural features and therefore adds difficulties to the separation task. To address the above limitations, we highlight the spectral difference between speech and noise spectra and incorporate the log-power spectra features to extend the DNN input. Tested on two different reverberant rooms at different signal to noise ratios (SNR), our proposed method shows advantages over the baseline method using only binaural features in terms of signal to distortion ratio (SDR) and Short-Time Perceptual Intelligibility (STOI).