Monaural Speech Separation

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 15 (NIPS 2002)

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Authors

Guoning Hu, Deliang Wang

Abstract

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Monaural speech separation has been studied in previous systems that incorporate auditory scene analysis principles. A major problem for these systems is their inability to deal with speech in the high- frequency range. Psychoacoustic evidence suggests that different perceptual mechanisms are involved in handling resolved and unresolved harmonics. Motivated by this, we propose a model for monaural separation low-frequency and high- frequency signals differently. For resolved harmonics, our model generates segments based on temporal continuity and cross-channel correlation, and groups them according to periodicity. For unresolved harmonics, the model generates segments based on amplitude modulation (AM) in addition to temporal continuity and groups them according to AM repetition rates derived from sinusoidal modeling. Underlying the separation process is a pitch contour obtained according to psychoacoustic constraints. Our model is systematically evaluated, and it yields substantially better performance than previous systems, especially in the high-frequency range.