Multimodal Target Speech Separation with Voice and Face References
This work addresses speech separation for applications where visual data is limited, enabling use on devices without cameras, though it is incremental as it builds on existing audio-visual methods.
The paper tackles target speech separation by using a single face image of the target speaker as auxiliary information, instead of requiring simultaneous visual streams like lip movements, and shows that this approach can effectively isolate speech, with further improvements when combining face and voice embeddings.
Target speech separation refers to isolating target speech from a multi-speaker mixture signal by conditioning on auxiliary information about the target speaker. Different from the mainstream audio-visual approaches which usually require simultaneous visual streams as additional input, e.g. the corresponding lip movement sequences, in our approach we propose the novel use of a single face profile of the target speaker to separate expected clean speech. We exploit the fact that the image of a face contains information about the person's speech sound. Compared to using a simultaneous visual sequence, a face image is easier to obtain by pre-enrollment or on websites, which enables the system to generalize to devices without cameras. To this end, we incorporate face embeddings extracted from a pretrained model for face recognition into the speech separation, which guide the system in predicting a target speaker mask in the time-frequency domain. The experimental results show that a pre-enrolled face image is able to benefit separating expected speech signals. Additionally, face information is complementary to voice reference and we show that further improvement can be achieved when combing both face and voice embeddings.