CVApr 19, 2023Code
CMID: A Unified Self-Supervised Learning Framework for Remote Sensing Image UnderstandingDilxat Muhtar, Xueliang Zhang, Pengfeng Xiao et al.
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has gained widespread attention in the remote sensing (RS) and earth observation (EO) communities owing to its ability to learn task-agnostic representations without human-annotated labels. Nevertheless, most existing RS SSL methods are limited to learning either global semantic separable or local spatial perceptible representations. We argue that this learning strategy is suboptimal in the realm of RS, since the required representations for different RS downstream tasks are often varied and complex. In this study, we proposed a unified SSL framework that is better suited for RS images representation learning. The proposed SSL framework, Contrastive Mask Image Distillation (CMID), is capable of learning representations with both global semantic separability and local spatial perceptibility by combining contrastive learning (CL) with masked image modeling (MIM) in a self-distillation way. Furthermore, our CMID learning framework is architecture-agnostic, which is compatible with both convolutional neural networks (CNN) and vision transformers (ViT), allowing CMID to be easily adapted to a variety of deep learning (DL) applications for RS understanding. Comprehensive experiments have been carried out on four downstream tasks (i.e. scene classification, semantic segmentation, object-detection, and change detection) and the results show that models pre-trained using CMID achieve better performance than other state-of-the-art SSL methods on multiple downstream tasks. The code and pre-trained models will be made available at https://github.com/NJU-LHRS/official-CMID to facilitate SSL research and speed up the development of RS images DL applications.
CVNov 19, 2023Code
Exchanging Dual Encoder-Decoder: A New Strategy for Change Detection with Semantic Guidance and Spatial LocalizationSijie Zhao, Xueliang Zhang, Pengfeng Xiao et al.
Change detection is a critical task in earth observation applications. Recently, deep learning-based methods have shown promising performance and are quickly adopted in change detection. However, the widely used multiple encoder and single decoder (MESD) as well as dual encoder-decoder (DED) architectures still struggle to effectively handle change detection well. The former has problems of bitemporal feature interference in the feature-level fusion, while the latter is inapplicable to intraclass change detection and multiview building change detection. To solve these problems, we propose a new strategy with an exchanging dual encoder-decoder structure for binary change detection with semantic guidance and spatial localization. The proposed strategy solves the problems of bitemporal feature inference in MESD by fusing bitemporal features in the decision level and the inapplicability in DED by determining changed areas using bitemporal semantic features. We build a binary change detection model based on this strategy, and then validate and compare it with 18 state-of-the-art change detection methods on six datasets in three scenarios, including intraclass change detection datasets (CDD, SYSU), single-view building change detection datasets (WHU, LEVIR-CD, LEVIR-CD+) and a multiview building change detection dataset (NJDS). The experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance with high efficiency and outperforms all benchmark methods with F1-scores of 97.77%, 83.07%, 94.86%, 92.33%, 91.39%, 74.35% on CDD, SYSU, WHU, LEVIR-CD, LEVIR- CD+, and NJDS datasets, respectively. The code of this work will be available at https://github.com/NJU-LHRS/official-SGSLN.
CVApr 15Code
Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution for Imbalanced Textures: A Texture-Aware Diffusion FrameworkEnzhuo Zhang, Sijie Zhao, Dilxat Muhtar et al.
Generative diffusion priors have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance in natural image super-resolution, demonstrating a powerful capability to synthesize photorealistic details. However, their direct application to remote sensing image super-resolution (RSISR) reveals significant shortcomings. Unlike natural images, remote sensing images exhibit a unique texture distribution where ground objects are globally stochastic yet locally clustered, leading to highly imbalanced textures. This imbalance severely hinders the model's spatial perception. To address this, we propose TexADiff, a novel framework that begins by estimating a Relative Texture Density Map (RTDM) to represent the texture distribution. TexADiff then leverages this RTDM in three synergistic ways: as an explicit spatial conditioning to guide the diffusion process, as a loss modulation term to prioritize texture-rich regions, and as a dynamic adapter for the sampling schedule. These modifications are designed to endow the model with explicit texture-aware capabilities. Experiments demonstrate that TexADiff achieves superior or competitive quantitative metrics. Furthermore, qualitative results show that our model generates faithful high-frequency details while effectively suppressing texture hallucinations. This improved reconstruction quality also results in significant gains in downstream task performance. The source code of our method can be found at https://github.com/ZezFuture/TexAdiff.
CVApr 3, 2024Code
RS-Mamba for Large Remote Sensing Image Dense PredictionSijie Zhao, Hao Chen, Xueliang Zhang et al.
Context modeling is critical for remote sensing image dense prediction tasks. Nowadays, the growing size of very-high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing images poses challenges in effectively modeling context. While transformer-based models possess global modeling capabilities, they encounter computational challenges when applied to large VHR images due to their quadratic complexity. The conventional practice of cropping large images into smaller patches results in a notable loss of contextual information. To address these issues, we propose the Remote Sensing Mamba (RSM) for dense prediction tasks in large VHR remote sensing images. RSM is specifically designed to capture the global context of remote sensing images with linear complexity, facilitating the effective processing of large VHR images. Considering that the land covers in remote sensing images are distributed in arbitrary spatial directions due to characteristics of remote sensing over-head imaging, the RSM incorporates an omnidirectional selective scan module to globally model the context of images in multiple directions, capturing large spatial features from various directions. Extensive experiments on semantic segmentation and change detection tasks across various land covers demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed RSM. We designed simple yet effective models based on RSM, achieving state-of-the-art performance on dense prediction tasks in VHR remote sensing images without fancy training strategies. Leveraging the linear complexity and global modeling capabilities, RSM achieves better efficiency and accuracy than transformer-based models on large remote sensing images. Interestingly, we also demonstrated that our model generally performs better with a larger image size on dense prediction tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/walking-shadow/Official_Remote_Sensing_Mamba.
CVMar 23
OpenEarth-Agent: From Tool Calling to Tool Creation for Open-Environment Earth ObservationSijie Zhao, Feng Liu, Xueliang Zhang et al.
Earth Observation (EO) is essential for perceiving dynamic land surface changes, yet deploying autonomous EO in open environments is hindered by the immense diversity of multi-source data and heterogeneous tasks. While remote sensing agents have emerged to streamline EO workflows, existing tool-calling agents are confined to closed environments. They rely on pre-defined tools and are restricted to narrow scope, limiting their generalization to the diverse data and tasks. To overcome these limitations, we introduce OpenEarth-Agent, the first tool-creation agent framework tailored for open-environment EO. Rather than calling predefined tools, OpenEarth-Agent employs adaptive workflow planning and tool creation to generalize to unseen data and tasks. This adaptability is bolstered by an open-ended integration of multi-stage tools and cross-domain knowledge bases, enabling robust execution in the entire EO pipeline across multiple application domains. To comprehensively evaluate EO agents in open environments, we propose OpenEarth-Bench, a novel benchmark comprising 596 real-world, full-pipeline cases across seven application domains, explicitly designed to assess agents' adaptive planning and tool creation capabilities. Only essential pre-trained model tools are provided in this benchmark, devoid of any other predefined task-specific tools. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OpenEarth-Agent successfully masters full-pipeline EO across multiple domains in the open environment. Notably, on the cross-benchmark Earth-Bench, our tool-creating agent equipped with 6 essential pre-trained models achieves performance comparable to tool-calling agents relying on 104 specialized tools, and significantly outperforms them when provided with the complete toolset. In several cases, the created tools exhibit superior robustness to data anomalies compared to human-engineered counterparts.
CVJul 17, 2024
VegeDiff: Latent Diffusion Model for Geospatial Vegetation ForecastingSijie Zhao, Hao Chen, Xueliang Zhang et al.
In the context of global climate change and frequent extreme weather events, forecasting future geospatial vegetation states under these conditions is of significant importance. The vegetation change process is influenced by the complex interplay between dynamic meteorological variables and static environmental variables, leading to high levels of uncertainty. Existing deterministic methods are inadequate in addressing this uncertainty and fail to accurately model the impact of these variables on vegetation, resulting in blurry and inaccurate forecasting results. To address these issues, we propose VegeDiff for the geospatial vegetation forecasting task. To our best knowledge, VegeDiff is the first to employ a diffusion model to probabilistically capture the uncertainties in vegetation change processes, enabling the generation of clear and accurate future vegetation states. VegeDiff also separately models the global impact of dynamic meteorological variables and the local effects of static environmental variables, thus accurately modeling the impact of these variables. Extensive experiments on geospatial vegetation forecasting tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of VegeDiff. By capturing the uncertainties in vegetation changes and modeling the complex influence of relevant variables, VegeDiff outperforms existing deterministic methods, providing clear and accurate forecasting results of future vegetation states. Interestingly, we demonstrate the potential of VegeDiff in applications of forecasting future vegetation states from multiple aspects and exploring the impact of meteorological variables on vegetation dynamics. The code of this work will be available at https://github.com/walking-shadow/ Official_VegeDiff.
CVNov 14, 2024Code
LHRS-Bot-Nova: Improved Multimodal Large Language Model for Remote Sensing Vision-Language InterpretationZhenshi Li, Dilxat Muhtar, Feng Gu et al.
Automatically and rapidly understanding Earth's surface is fundamental to our grasp of the living environment and informed decision-making. This underscores the need for a unified system with comprehensive capabilities in analyzing Earth's surface to address a wide range of human needs. The emergence of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has great potential in boosting the efficiency and convenience of intelligent Earth observation. These models can engage in human-like conversations, serve as unified platforms for understanding images, follow diverse instructions, and provide insightful feedbacks. In this study, we introduce LHRS-Bot-Nova, an MLLM specialized in understanding remote sensing (RS) images, designed to expertly perform a wide range of RS understanding tasks aligned with human instructions. LHRS-Bot-Nova features an enhanced vision encoder and a novel bridge layer, enabling efficient visual compression and better language-vision alignment. To further enhance RS-oriented vision-language alignment, we propose a large-scale RS image-caption dataset, generated through feature-guided image recaptioning. Additionally, we introduce an instruction dataset specifically designed to improve spatial recognition abilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior performance of LHRS-Bot-Nova across various RS image understanding tasks. We also evaluate different MLLM performances in complex RS perception and instruction following using a complicated multi-choice question evaluation benchmark, providing a reliable guide for future model selection and improvement. Data, code, and models will be available at https://github.com/NJU-LHRS/LHRS-Bot.
CVMar 2, 2025Code
Quality-Driven Curation of Remote Sensing Vision-Language Data via Learned Scoring ModelsDilxat Muhtar, Enzhuo Zhang, Zhenshi Li et al.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated great potential in interpreting remote sensing (RS) images through language-guided semantic. However, the effectiveness of these VLMs critically depends on high-quality image-text training data that captures rich semantic relationships between visual content and language descriptions. Unlike natural images, RS lacks large-scale interleaved image-text pairs from web data, making data collection challenging. While current approaches rely primarily on rule-based methods or flagship VLMs for data synthesis, a systematic framework for automated quality assessment of such synthetically generated RS vision-language data is notably absent. To fill this gap, we propose a novel score model trained on large-scale RS vision-language preference data for automated quality assessment. Our empirical results demonstrate that fine-tuning CLIP or advanced VLMs (e.g., Qwen2-VL) with the top 30% of data ranked by our score model achieves superior accuracy compared to both full-data fine-tuning and CLIP-score-based ranking approaches. Furthermore, we demonstrate applications of our scoring model for reinforcement learning (RL) training and best-of-N (BoN) test-time scaling, enabling significant improvements in VLM performance for RS tasks. Our code, model, and dataset are publicly available
CVFeb 6, 2024Code
SISP: A Benchmark Dataset for Fine-grained Ship Instance Segmentation in Panchromatic Satellite ImagesPengming Feng, Mingjie Xie, Hongning Liu et al.
Fine-grained ship instance segmentation in satellite images holds considerable significance for monitoring maritime activities at sea. However, existing datasets often suffer from the scarcity of fine-grained information or pixel-wise localization annotations, as well as the insufficient image diversity and variations, thus limiting the research of this task. To this end, we propose a benchmark dataset for fine-grained Ship Instance Segmentation in Panchromatic satellite images, namely SISP, which contains 56,693 well-annotated ship instances with four fine-grained categories across 10,000 sliced images, and all the images are collected from SuperView-1 satellite with the resolution of 0.5m. Targets in the proposed SISP dataset have characteristics that are consistent with real satellite scenes, such as high class imbalance, various scenes, large variations in target densities and scales, and high inter-class similarity and intra-class diversity, all of which make the SISP dataset more suitable for real-world applications. In addition, we introduce a Dynamic Feature Refinement-assist Instance segmentation network, namely DFRInst, as the benchmark method for ship instance segmentation in satellite images, which can fortify the explicit representation of crucial features, thus improving the performance of ship instance segmentation. Experiments and analysis are performed on the proposed SISP dataset to evaluate the benchmark method and several state-of-the-art methods to establish baselines for facilitating future research. The proposed dataset and source codes will be available at: https://github.com/Justlovesmile/SISP.
CVNov 18, 2025Code
FarSLIP: Discovering Effective CLIP Adaptation for Fine-Grained Remote Sensing UnderstandingZhenshi Li, Weikang Yu, Dilxat Muhtar et al.
As CLIP's global alignment limits its ability to capture fine-grained details, recent efforts have focused on enhancing its region-text alignment. However, current remote sensing (RS)-specific CLIP variants still inherit this limited spatial awareness. We identify two key limitations behind this: (1) current RS image-text datasets generate global captions from object-level labels, leaving the original object-level supervision underutilized; (2) despite the success of region-text alignment methods in general domain, their direct application to RS data often leads to performance degradation. To address these, we construct the first multi-granularity RS image-text dataset, MGRS-200k, featuring rich object-level textual supervision for RS region-category alignment. We further investigate existing fine-grained CLIP tuning strategies and find that current explicit region-text alignment methods, whether in a direct or indirect way, underperform due to severe degradation of CLIP's semantic coherence. Building on these, we propose FarSLIP, a Fine-grained Aligned RS Language-Image Pretraining framework. Rather than the commonly used patch-to-CLS self-distillation, FarSLIP employs patch-to-patch distillation to align local and global visual cues, which improves feature discriminability while preserving semantic coherence. Additionally, to effectively utilize region-text supervision, it employs simple CLS token-based region-category alignment rather than explicit patch-level alignment, further enhancing spatial awareness. FarSLIP features improved fine-grained vision-language alignment in RS domain and sets a new state of the art not only on RS open-vocabulary semantic segmentation, but also on image-level tasks such as zero-shot classification and image-text retrieval. Our dataset, code, and models are available at https://github.com/NJU-LHRS/FarSLIP.
CVFeb 4, 2024
LHRS-Bot: Empowering Remote Sensing with VGI-Enhanced Large Multimodal Language ModelDilxat Muhtar, Zhenshi Li, Feng Gu et al.
The revolutionary capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have paved the way for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and fostered diverse applications across various specialized domains. In the remote sensing (RS) field, however, the diverse geographical landscapes and varied objects in RS imagery are not adequately considered in recent MLLM endeavors. To bridge this gap, we construct a large-scale RS image-text dataset, LHRS-Align, and an informative RS-specific instruction dataset, LHRS-Instruct, leveraging the extensive volunteered geographic information (VGI) and globally available RS images. Building on this foundation, we introduce LHRS-Bot, an MLLM tailored for RS image understanding through a novel multi-level vision-language alignment strategy and a curriculum learning method. Additionally, we introduce LHRS-Bench, a benchmark for thoroughly evaluating MLLMs' abilities in RS image understanding. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that LHRS-Bot exhibits a profound understanding of RS images and the ability to perform nuanced reasoning within the RS domain.
CLNov 14, 2024
StreamAdapter: Efficient Test Time Adaptation from Contextual StreamsDilxat Muhtar, Yelong Shen, Yaming Yang et al.
In-context learning (ICL) allows large language models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks directly from the given demonstrations without requiring gradient updates. While recent advances have expanded context windows to accommodate more demonstrations, this approach increases inference costs without necessarily improving performance. To mitigate these issues, We propose StreamAdapter, a novel approach that directly updates model parameters from context at test time, eliminating the need for explicit in-context demonstrations. StreamAdapter employs context mapping and weight absorption mechanisms to dynamically transform ICL demonstrations into parameter updates with minimal additional parameters. By reducing reliance on numerous in-context examples, StreamAdapter significantly reduce inference costs and allows for efficient inference with constant time complexity, regardless of demonstration count. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks and model architectures demonstrate that StreamAdapter achieves comparable or superior adaptation capability to ICL while requiring significantly fewer demonstrations. The superior task adaptation and context encoding capabilities of StreamAdapter on both language understanding and generation tasks provides a new perspective for adapting LLMs at test time using context, allowing for more efficient adaptation across scenarios and more cost-effective inference
CVMar 9, 2025
Transforming Weather Data from Pixel to Latent SpaceSijie Zhao, Feng Liu, Xueliang Zhang et al.
The increasing impact of climate change and extreme weather events has spurred growing interest in deep learning for weather research. However, existing studies often rely on weather data in pixel space, which presents several challenges such as smooth outputs in model outputs, limited applicability to a single pressure-variable subset (PVS), and high data storage and computational costs. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Weather Latent Autoencoder (WLA) that transforms weather data from pixel space to latent space, enabling efficient weather task modeling. By decoupling weather reconstruction from downstream tasks, WLA improves the accuracy and sharpness of weather task model results. The incorporated Pressure-Variable Unified Module transforms multiple PVS into a unified representation, enhancing the adaptability of the model in multiple weather scenarios. Furthermore, weather tasks can be performed in a low-storage latent space of WLA rather than a high-storage pixel space, thus significantly reducing data storage and computational costs. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate its superior compression and reconstruction performance, enabling the creation of the ERA5-latent dataset with unified representations of multiple PVS from ERA5 data. The compressed full PVS in the ERA5-latent dataset reduces the original 244.34 TB of data to 0.43 TB. The downstream task further demonstrates that task models can apply to multiple PVS with low data costs in latent space and achieve superior performance compared to models in pixel space. Code, ERA5-latent data, and pre-trained models are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Weather-Latent-Autoencoder-8467.
CVMay 18, 2025
Spatial-Temporal-Spectral Unified Modeling for Remote Sensing Dense PredictionSijie Zhao, Feng Liu, Enzhuo Zhang et al.
The proliferation of multi-source remote sensing data has propelled the development of deep learning for dense prediction, yet significant challenges in data and task unification persist. Current deep learning architectures for remote sensing are fundamentally rigid. They are engineered for fixed input-output configurations, restricting their adaptability to the heterogeneous spatial, temporal, and spectral dimensions inherent in real-world data. Furthermore, these models neglect the intrinsic correlations among semantic segmentation, binary change detection, and semantic change detection, necessitating the development of distinct models or task-specific decoders. This paradigm is also constrained to a predefined set of output semantic classes, where any change to the classes requires costly retraining. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the Spatial-Temporal-Spectral Unified Network (STSUN) for unified modeling. STSUN can adapt to input and output data with arbitrary spatial sizes, temporal lengths, and spectral bands by leveraging their metadata for a unified representation. Moreover, STSUN unifies disparate dense prediction tasks within a single architecture by conditioning the model on trainable task embeddings. Similarly, STSUN facilitates flexible prediction across multiple set of semantic categories by integrating trainable category embeddings as metadata. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets with diverse Spatial-Temporal-Spectral configurations in multiple scenarios demonstrate that a single STSUN model effectively adapts to heterogeneous inputs and outputs, unifying various dense prediction tasks and diverse semantic class predictions. The proposed approach consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting its robustness and generalizability for complex remote sensing applications.
SDMay 6, 2021
DBNet: A Dual-branch Network Architecture Processing on Spectrum and Waveform for Single-channel Speech EnhancementKanghao Zhang, Shulin He, Hao Li et al.
In real acoustic environment, speech enhancement is an arduous task to improve the quality and intelligibility of speech interfered by background noise and reverberation. Over the past years, deep learning has shown great potential on speech enhancement. In this paper, we propose a novel real-time framework called DBNet which is a dual-branch structure with alternate interconnection. Each branch incorporates an encoder-decoder architecture with skip connections. The two branches are responsible for spectrum and waveform modeling, respectively. A bridge layer is adopted to exchange information between the two branches. Systematic evaluation and comparison show that the proposed system substantially outperforms related algorithms under very challenging environments. And in INTERSPEECH 2021 Deep Noise Suppression (DNS) challenge, the proposed system ranks the top 8 in real-time track 1 in terms of the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of the ITU-T P.835 framework.
SDMar 26, 2021
Guided Training: A Simple Method for Single-channel Speaker SeparationHao Li, Xueliang Zhang, Guanglai Gao
Deep learning has shown a great potential for speech separation, especially for speech and non-speech separation. However, it encounters permutation problem for multi-speaker separation where both target and interference are speech. Permutation Invariant training (PIT) was proposed to solve this problem by permuting the order of the multiple speakers. Another way is to use an anchor speech, a short speech of the target speaker, to model the speaker identity. In this paper, we propose a simple strategy to train a long short-term memory (LSTM) model to solve the permutation problem in speaker separation. Specifically, we insert a short speech of target speaker at the beginning of a mixture as guide information. So, the first appearing speaker is defined as the target. Due to the powerful capability on sequence modeling, LSTM can use its memory cells to track and separate target speech from interfering speech. Experimental results show that the proposed training strategy is effective for speaker separation.
SDOct 25, 2020
Speakerfilter-Pro: an improved target speaker extractor combines the time domain and frequency domainShulin He, Hao Li, Xueliang Zhang
This paper introduces an improved target speaker extractor, referred to as Speakerfilter-Pro, based on our previous Speakerfilter model. The Speakerfilter uses a bi-direction gated recurrent unit (BGRU) module to characterize the target speaker from anchor speech and use a convolutional recurrent network (CRN) module to separate the target speech from a noisy signal.Different from the Speakerfilter, the Speakerfilter-Pro sticks a WaveUNet module in the beginning and the ending, respectively. The WaveUNet has been proven to have a better ability to perform speech separation in the time domain. In order to extract the target speaker information better, the complex spectrum instead of the magnitude spectrum is utilized as the input feature for the CRN module. Experiments are conducted on the two-speaker dataset (WSJ0-mix2) which is widely used for speaker extraction. The systematic evaluation shows that the Speakerfilter-Pro outperforms the Speakerfilter and other baselines, and achieves a signal-to-distortion ratio (SDR) of 14.95 dB.
SDFeb 2, 2020
Single Channel Speech Enhancement Using Temporal Convolutional Recurrent Neural NetworksJingdong Li, Hui Zhang, Xueliang Zhang et al.
In recent decades, neural network based methods have significantly improved the performace of speech enhancement. Most of them estimate time-frequency (T-F) representation of target speech directly or indirectly, then resynthesize waveform using the estimated T-F representation. In this work, we proposed the temporal convolutional recurrent network (TCRN), an end-to-end model that directly map noisy waveform to clean waveform. The TCRN, which is combined convolution and recurrent neural network, is able to efficiently and effectively leverage short-term ang long-term information. Futuremore, we present the architecture that repeatedly downsample and upsample speech during forward propagation. We show that our model is able to improve the performance of model, compared with existing convolutional recurrent networks. Futuremore, We present several key techniques to stabilize the training process. The experimental results show that our model consistently outperforms existing speech enhancement approaches, in terms of speech intelligibility and quality.
SDJun 20, 2019
A Monaural Speech Enhancement Method for Robust Small-Footprint Keyword SpottingYue Gu, Zhihao Du, Hui Zhang et al.
Robustness against noise is critical for keyword spotting (KWS) in real-world environments. To improve the robustness, a speech enhancement front-end is involved. Instead of treating the speech enhancement as a separated preprocessing before the KWS system, in this study, a pre-trained speech enhancement front-end and a convolutional neural networks (CNNs) based KWS system are concatenated, where a feature transformation block is used to transform the output from the enhancement front-end into the KWS system's input. The whole model is trained jointly, thus the linguistic and other useful information from the KWS system can be back-propagated to the enhancement front-end to improve its performance. To fit the small-footprint device, a novel convolution recurrent network is proposed, which needs fewer parameters and computation and does not degrade performance. Furthermore, by changing the input features from the power spectrogram to Mel-spectrogram, less computation and better performance are obtained. our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the KWS system with respect to noise robustness.
SDOct 22, 2018
Investigation of Monaural Front-End Processing for Robust ASR without Retraining or Joint-TrainingZhihao Du, Xueliang Zhang, Jiqing Han
In recent years, monaural speech separation has been formulated as a supervised learning problem, which has been systematically researched and shown the dramatical improvement of speech intelligibility and quality for human listeners. However, it has not been well investigated whether the methods can be employed as the front-end processing and directly improve the performance of a machine listener, i.e., an automatic speech recognizer, without retraining or joint-training the acoustic model. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of the independent front-end processing for the multi-conditional trained ASR on the CHiME-3 challenge. We find that directly feeding the enhanced features to ASR can make 36.40% and 11.78% relative WER reduction for the GMM-based and DNN-based ASR respectively. We also investigate the affect of noisy phase and generalization ability under unmatched noise condition.
SDSep 4, 2017
Using Optimal Ratio Mask as Training Target for Supervised Speech SeparationShasha Xia, Hao Li, Xueliang Zhang
Supervised speech separation uses supervised learning algorithms to learn a mapping from an input noisy signal to an output target. With the fast development of deep learning, supervised separation has become the most important direction in speech separation area in recent years. For the supervised algorithm, training target has a significant impact on the performance. Ideal ratio mask is a commonly used training target, which can improve the speech intelligibility and quality of the separated speech. However, it does not take into account the correlation between noise and clean speech. In this paper, we use the optimal ratio mask as the training target of the deep neural network (DNN) for speech separation. The experiments are carried out under various noise environments and signal to noise ratio (SNR) conditions. The results show that the optimal ratio mask outperforms other training targets in general.
SDAug 28, 2017
Integrated Speech Enhancement Method Based on Weighted Prediction Error and DNN for Dereverberation and DenoisingHao Li, Xueliang Zhang, Hui Zhang et al.
Both reverberation and additive noises degrade the speech quality and intelligibility. Weighted prediction error (WPE) method performs well on the dereverberation but with limitations. First, WPE doesn't consider the influence of the additive noise which degrades the performance of dereverberation. Second, it relies on a time-consuming iterative process, and there is no guarantee or a widely accepted criterion on its convergence. In this paper, we integrate deep neural network (DNN) into WPE for dereverberation and denoising. DNN is used to suppress the background noise to meet the noise-free assumption of WPE. Meanwhile, DNN is applied to directly predict spectral variance of the target speech to make the WPE work without iteration. The experimental results show that the proposed method has a significant improvement in speech quality and runs fast.