Efren Fernandez-Grande

Xinmeng Luan, Samuel A. Verburg, Efren Fernandez-Grande et al.

In this paper, we propose a reconstruction framework that leverages the Wavelet Scattering Transform (WST) as a multi-scale feature extractor to impose statistical priors under sparse observation conditions. The reconstruction problem is formulated as an optimization task and solved using a neural field, with the WST incorporated into the training loss function. As a proof of concept, we validate the proposed method on HRTF upsampling. A masking strategy is applied to the WST coefficients, resulting in a two-phase procedure. The first phase learns a binary mask from a small multi-subject dataset, while the second phase applies the learned mask to the WST coefficients of an individual HRTF to preserve informative statistical structures during reconstruction. Validation against baseline methods, which also serve as an ablation study of the different components of the framework, demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Xenofon Karakonstantis, Efren Fernandez-Grande

This paper presents a deep learning-based approach for the spatio-temporal reconstruction of sound fields using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The method utilises a plane wave basis and learns the underlying statistical distributions of pressure in rooms to accurately reconstruct sound fields from a limited number of measurements. The performance of the method is evaluated using two established datasets and compared to state-of-the-art methods. The results show that the model is able to achieve an improved reconstruction performance in terms of accuracy and energy retention, particularly in the high-frequency range and when extrapolating beyond the measurement region. Furthermore, the proposed method can handle a varying number of measurement positions and configurations without sacrificing performance. The results suggest that this approach provides a promising approach to sound field reconstruction using generative models that allow for a physically informed prior to acoustics problems.

Michael J. Bianco, Sharon Gannot, Efren Fernandez-Grande et al.

We propose a semi-supervised approach to acoustic source localization in reverberant environments based on deep generative modeling. Localization in reverberant environments remains an open challenge. Even with large data volumes, the number of labels available for supervised learning in reverberant environments is usually small. We address this issue by performing semi-supervised learning (SSL) with convolutional variational autoencoders (VAEs) on reverberant speech signals recorded with microphone arrays. The VAE is trained to generate the phase of relative transfer functions (RTFs) between microphones, in parallel with a direction of arrival (DOA) classifier based on RTF-phase. These models are trained using both labeled and unlabeled RTF-phase sequences. In learning to perform these tasks, the VAE-SSL explicitly learns to separate the physical causes of the RTF-phase (i.e., source location) from distracting signal characteristics such as noise and speech activity. Relative to existing semi-supervised localization methods in acoustics, VAE-SSL is effectively an end-to-end processing approach which relies on minimal preprocessing of RTF-phase features. As far as we are aware, our paper presents the first approach to modeling the physics of acoustic propagation using deep generative modeling. The VAE-SSL approach is compared with two signal processing-based approaches, steered response power with phase transform (SRP-PHAT) and MUltiple SIgnal Classification (MUSIC), as well as fully supervised CNNs. We find that VAE-SSL can outperform the conventional approaches and the CNN in label-limited scenarios. Further, the trained VAE-SSL system can generate new RTF-phase samples, which shows the VAE-SSL approach learns the physics of the acoustic environment. The generative modeling in VAE-SSL thus provides a means of interpreting the learned representations.