Braille-to-Speech Generator: Audio Generation Based on Joint Fine-Tuning of CLIP and Fastspeech2
This addresses the reading efficiency of visually impaired Chinese speakers by overcoming data and language limitations, though it is incremental as it adapts existing methods to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of generating Chinese speech from Braille images for visually impaired people by constructing a CLIP-KNN-Fastspeech2 framework, achieving improvements in metrics like BLEU4, FAD, WER, and inference speed on multiple datasets.
An increasing number of Chinese people are troubled by different degrees of visual impairment, which has made the modal conversion between a single image or video frame in the visual field and the audio expressing the same information a research hotspot. Deep learning technologies such as OCR+Vocoder and Im2Wav enable English audio synthesis or image-to-sound matching in a self-supervised manner. However, the audio data used for training is limited and English is not universal for visually impaired people with different educational levels. Therefore, for the sake of solving the problems of data volume and language applicability to improve the reading efficiency of visually impaired people, a set of image-to-speech framework CLIP-KNN-Fastspeech2 based on the Chinese context was constructed. The framework integrates multiple basic models and adopts the strategy of independent pre-training and joint fine-tuning. First, the Chinese CLIP and Fastspeech2 text-to-speech models were pre-trained on two public datasets, MUGE and Baker, respectively, and their convergence was verified. Subsequently, joint fine-tuning was performed using a self-built Braille image dataset. Experimental results on multiple public datasets such as VGGSound, Flickr8k, ImageHear, and the self-built Braille dataset BIT-DP show that the model has improved objective indicators such as BLEU4,FAD(Fréchet Audio Distance), WER(Word Error Ratio), and even inference speed. This verifies that the constructed model still has the ability to synthesize high-quality speech under limited data, and also proves the effectiveness of the joint training strategy that integrates multiple basic models.