English

TS-RIR: Translated synthetic room impulse responses for speech augmentation

Sound 2021-11-15 v5 Audio and Speech Processing

Abstract

We present a method for improving the quality of synthetic room impulse responses for far-field speech recognition. We bridge the gap between the fidelity of synthetic room impulse responses (RIRs) and the real room impulse responses using our novel, TS-RIRGAN architecture. Given a synthetic RIR in the form of raw audio, we use TS-RIRGAN to translate it into a real RIR. We also perform real-world sub-band room equalization on the translated synthetic RIR. Our overall approach improves the quality of synthetic RIRs by compensating low-frequency wave effects, similar to those in real RIRs. We evaluate the performance of improved synthetic RIRs on a far-field speech dataset augmented by convolving the LibriSpeech clean speech dataset [1] with RIRs and adding background noise. We show that far-field speech augmented using our improved synthetic RIRs reduces the word error rate by up to 19.9% in Kaldi far-field automatic speech recognition benchmark [2].

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2103.16804,
  title  = {TS-RIR: Translated synthetic room impulse responses for speech augmentation},
  author = {Anton Ratnarajah and Zhenyu Tang and Dinesh Manocha},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.16804},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Accepted to IEEE ASRU 2021. Source code is available at https://github.com/GAMMA-UMD/TS-RIR

R2 v1 2026-06-24T00:43:09.775Z