CSLNSpeech: solving extended speech separation problem with the help of Chinese sign language
This work addresses speech separation for hearing-impaired people by leveraging sign language, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing audio-visual methods.
The paper tackles the extended speech separation problem by incorporating sign language alongside audio and face modalities, achieving better performance and robustness than standard audio-visual systems.
Previous audio-visual speech separation methods use the synchronization of the speaker's facial movement and speech in the video to supervise the speech separation in a self-supervised way. In this paper, we propose a model to solve the speech separation problem assisted by both face and sign language, which we call the extended speech separation problem. We design a general deep learning network for learning the combination of three modalities, audio, face, and sign language information, for better solving the speech separation problem. To train the model, we introduce a large-scale dataset named the Chinese Sign Language News Speech (CSLNSpeech) dataset, in which three modalities of audio, face, and sign language coexist. Experiment results show that the proposed model has better performance and robustness than the usual audio-visual system. Besides, sign language modality can also be used alone to supervise speech separation tasks, and the introduction of sign language is helpful for hearing-impaired people to learn and communicate. Last, our model is a general speech separation framework and can achieve very competitive separation performance on two open-source audio-visual datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/iveveive/SLNSpeech