Dongyan Huang

Leyuan Sheng, Dong-Yan Huang, Evgeniy N. Pavlovskiy

In speech synthesis and speech enhancement systems, melspectrograms need to be precise in acoustic representations. However, the generated spectrograms are over-smooth, that could not produce high quality synthesized speech. Inspired by image-to-image translation, we address this problem by using a learning-based post filter combining Pix2PixHD and ResUnet to reconstruct the mel-spectrograms together with super-resolution. From the resulting super-resolution spectrogram networks, we can generate enhanced spectrograms to produce high quality synthesized speech. Our proposed model achieves improved mean opinion scores (MOS) of 3.71 and 4.01 over baseline results of 3.29 and 3.84, while using vocoder Griffin-Lim and WaveNet, respectively.

Shan Yang, Lei Xie, Xiao Chen et al.

In this paper, we aim at improving the performance of synthesized speech in statistical parametric speech synthesis (SPSS) based on a generative adversarial network (GAN). In particular, we propose a novel architecture combining the traditional acoustic loss function and the GAN's discriminative loss under a multi-task learning (MTL) framework. The mean squared error (MSE) is usually used to estimate the parameters of deep neural networks, which only considers the numerical difference between the raw audio and the synthesized one. To mitigate this problem, we introduce the GAN as a second task to determine if the input is a natural speech with specific conditions. In this MTL framework, the MSE optimization improves the stability of GAN, and at the same time GAN produces samples with a distribution closer to natural speech. Listening tests show that the multi-task architecture can generate more natural speech that satisfies human perception than the conventional methods.