Improving Reverberant Speech Separation with Multi-stage Training and Curriculum Learning
This work addresses speech separation in noisy environments for applications like hearing aids or voice assistants, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing methods with new training strategies.
The paper tackled the problem of reverberant speech separation by developing a novel approach using a geometric acoustic simulator and advanced training methods, achieving a significant relative improvement over prior techniques based on the image source method.
We present a novel approach that improves the performance of reverberant speech separation. Our approach is based on an accurate geometric acoustic simulator (GAS) which generates realistic room impulse responses (RIRs) by modeling both specular and diffuse reflections. We also propose three training methods - pre-training, multi-stage training and curriculum learning that significantly improve separation quality in the presence of reverberation. We also demonstrate that mixing the synthetic RIRs with a small number of real RIRs during training enhances separation performance. We evaluate our approach on reverberant mixtures generated from real, recorded data (in several different room configurations) from the VOiCES dataset. Our novel approach (curriculum learning+pre-training+multi-stage training) results in a significant relative improvement over prior techniques based on image source method (ISM).