Enhanced Neural Beamformer with Spatial Information for Target Speech Extraction
This work addresses speech separation for audio processing applications, representing an incremental improvement over existing neural beamforming methods.
The paper tackles target speech extraction by enhancing neural beamformers with better spatial information utilization, achieving improved speech separation performance through a UNet-TCN structure and multi-head cross-attention mechanism.
Recently, deep learning-based beamforming algorithms have shown promising performance in target speech extraction tasks. However, most systems do not fully utilize spatial information. In this paper, we propose a target speech extraction network that utilizes spatial information to enhance the performance of neural beamformer. To achieve this, we first use the UNet-TCN structure to model input features and improve the estimation accuracy of the speech pre-separation module by avoiding information loss caused by direct dimensionality reduction in other models. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-head cross-attention mechanism that enhances the neural beamformer's perception of spatial information by making full use of the spatial information received by the array. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach, which incorporates a more reasonable target mask estimation network and a spatial information-based cross-attention mechanism into the neural beamformer, effectively improves speech separation performance.