English

Real-time speech enhancement in noise for throat microphone using neural audio codec as foundation model

Audio and Speech Processing 2025-08-06 v1

Abstract

We present a real-time speech enhancement demo using speech captured with a throat microphone. This demo aims to showcase the complete pipeline, from recording to deep learning-based post-processing, for speech captured in noisy environments with a body-conducted microphone. The throat microphone records skin vibrations, which naturally attenuate external noise, but this robustness comes at the cost of reduced audio bandwidth. To address this challenge, we fine-tune Kyutai's Mimi--a neural audio codec supporting real-time inference--on Vibravox, a dataset containing paired air-conducted and throat microphone recordings. We compare this enhancement strategy against state-of-the-art models and demonstrate its superior performance. The inference runs in an interactive interface that allows users to toggle enhancement, visualize spectrograms, and monitor processing latency.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.02974,
  title  = {Real-time speech enhancement in noise for throat microphone using neural audio codec as foundation model},
  author = {Julien Hauret and Thomas Joubaud and Éric Bavu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.02974},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

2 pages, 2 figures