Direction of Arrival Correction through Speech Quality Feedback
This work addresses a specific bottleneck in speech enhancement systems for real-time applications, offering an incremental improvement to existing methods.
The paper tackles the sensitivity of the Demucs Denoiser model to errors in direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation in multi-speaker scenarios by proposing a DOA correction scheme that uses real-time speech quality feedback in an Adam-based optimization loop, achieving correction of up to 15° errors.
Real-time speech enhancement has began to rise in performance, and the Demucs Denoiser model has recently demonstrated strong performance in multiple-speech-source scenarios when accompanied by a location-based speech target selection strategy. However, it has shown to be sensitive to errors in the direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation. In this work, a DOA correction scheme is proposed that uses the real-time estimated speech quality of its enhanced output as the observed variable in an Adam-based optimization feedback loop to find the correct DOA. In spite of the high variability of the speech quality estimation, the proposed system is able to correct in real-time an error of up to 15$^o$ using only the speech quality as its guide. Several insights are provided for future versions of the proposed system to speed up convergence and further reduce the speech quality estimation variability.