English

Improved MVDR Beamforming Using LSTM Speech Models to Clean Spatial Clustering Masks

Sound 2020-12-07 v1 Machine Learning Audio and Speech Processing

Abstract

Spatial clustering techniques can achieve significant multi-channel noise reduction across relatively arbitrary microphone configurations, but have difficulty incorporating a detailed speech/noise model. In contrast, LSTM neural networks have successfully been trained to recognize speech from noise on single-channel inputs, but have difficulty taking full advantage of the information in multi-channel recordings. This paper integrates these two approaches, training LSTM speech models to clean the masks generated by the Model-based EM Source Separation and Localization (MESSL) spatial clustering method. By doing so, it attains both the spatial separation performance and generality of multi-channel spatial clustering and the signal modeling performance of multiple parallel single-channel LSTM speech enhancers. Our experiments show that when our system is applied to the CHiME-3 dataset of noisy tablet recordings, it increases speech quality as measured by the Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) algorithm and reduces the word error rate of the baseline CHiME-3 speech recognizer, as compared to the default BeamformIt beamformer.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2012.02191,
  title  = {Improved MVDR Beamforming Using LSTM Speech Models to Clean Spatial Clustering Masks},
  author = {Zhaoheng Ni and Felix Grezes and Viet Anh Trinh and Michael I. Mandel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.02191},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2012.01576

R2 v1 2026-06-23T20:42:58.773Z