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Chengshi Zheng

Publications and source records attributed to Chengshi Zheng.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Audio Deepfake Detection Based on a Combination of F0 Information and Real Plus Imaginary Spectrogram Features

Recently, pioneer research works have proposed a large number of acoustic features (log power spectrogram, linear frequency cepstral coefficients, constant Q cepstral coefficients, etc.) for audio deepfake detection, obtaining good performance, and showing that different subbands have different contributions to audio deepfake detection. However, this lacks an explanation of the specific information in the subband, and these features also lose information such as phase. Inspired by the mechanism of synthetic speech, the fundamental frequency (F0) information is used to improve the quality of synthetic speech, while the F0 of synthetic speech is still too average, which differs significantly from that of real speech. It is expected that F0 can be used as important information to discriminate between bonafide and fake speech, while this information cannot be used directly due to the irregular distribution of F0. Insteadly, the frequency band containing most of F0 is selected as the input feature. Meanwhile, to make full use of the phase and full-band information, we also propose to use real and imaginary spectrogram features as complementary input features and model the disjoint subbands separately. Finally, the results of F0, real and imaginary spectrogram features are fused. Experimental results on the ASVspoof 2019 LA dataset show that our proposed system is very effective for the audio deepfake detection task, achieving an equivalent error rate (EER) of 0.43%, which surpasses almost all systems.

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DBT-Net: Dual-branch federative magnitude and phase estimation with attention-in-attention transformer for monaural speech enhancement

The decoupling-style concept begins to ignite in the speech enhancement area, which decouples the original complex spectrum estimation task into multiple easier sub-tasks i.e., magnitude-only recovery and the residual complex spectrum estimation)}, resulting in better performance and easier interpretability. In this paper, we propose a dual-branch federative magnitude and phase estimation framework, dubbed DBT-Net, for monaural speech enhancement, aiming at recovering the coarse- and fine-grained regions of the overall spectrum in parallel. From the complementary perspective, the magnitude estimation branch is designed to filter out dominant noise components in the magnitude domain, while the complex spectrum purification branch is elaborately designed to inpaint the missing spectral details and implicitly estimate the phase information in the complex-valued spectral domain. To facilitate the information flow between each branch, interaction modules are introduced to leverage features learned from one branch, so as to suppress the undesired parts and recover the missing components of the other branch. Instead of adopting the conventional RNNs and temporal convolutional networks for sequence modeling, we employ a novel attention-in-attention transformer-based network within each branch for better feature learning. More specially, it is composed of several adaptive spectro-temporal attention transformer-based modules and an adaptive hierarchical attention module, aiming to capture long-term time-frequency dependencies and further aggregate intermediate hierarchical contextual information. Comprehensive evaluations on the WSJ0-SI84 + DNS-Challenge and VoiceBank + DEMAND dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently outperforms previous advanced systems and yields state-of-the-art performance in terms of speech quality and intelligibility.

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DMF-Net: A decoupling-style multi-band fusion model for full-band speech enhancement

For the difficulty and large computational complexity of modeling more frequency bands, full-band speech enhancement based on deep neural networks is still challenging. Previous studies usually adopt compressed full-band speech features in Bark and ERB scale with relatively low frequency resolution, leading to degraded performance, especially in the high-frequency region. In this paper, we propose a decoupling-style multi-band fusion model to perform full-band speech denoising and dereverberation. Instead of optimizing the full-band speech by a single network structure, we decompose the full-band target into multi sub-band speech features and then employ a multi-stage chain optimization strategy to estimate clean spectrum stage by stage. Specifically, the low- (0-8 kHz), middle- (8-16 kHz), and high-frequency (16-24 kHz) regions are mapped by three separate sub-networks and are then fused to obtain the full-band clean target STFT spectrum. Comprehensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms previous advanced systems and yields promising performance in terms of speech quality and intelligibility in real complex scenarios.

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TMGAN-PLC: Audio Packet Loss Concealment using Temporal Memory Generative Adversarial Network

Real-time communications in packet-switched networks have become widely used in daily communication, while they inevitably suffer from network delays and data losses in constrained real-time conditions. To solve these problems, audio packet loss concealment (PLC) algorithms have been developed to mitigate voice transmission failures by reconstructing the lost information. Limited by the transmission latency and device memory, it is still intractable for PLC to accomplish high-quality voice reconstruction using a relatively small packet buffer. In this paper, we propose a temporal memory generative adversarial network for audio PLC, dubbed TMGAN-PLC, which is comprised of a novel nested-UNet generator and the time-domain/frequency-domain discriminators. Specifically, a combination of the nested-UNet and temporal feature-wise linear modulation is elaborately devised in the generator to finely adjust the intra-frame information and establish inter-frame temporal dependencies. To complement the missing speech content caused by longer loss bursts, we employ multi-stage gated vector quantizers to capture the correct content and reconstruct the near-real smooth audio. Extensive experiments on the PLC Challenge dataset demonstrate that the proposed method yields promising performance in terms of speech quality, intelligibility, and PLCMOS.

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Optimizing Shoulder to Shoulder: A Coordinated Sub-Band Fusion Model for Real-Time Full-Band Speech Enhancement

Due to the high computational complexity to model more frequency bands, it is still intractable to conduct real-time full-band speech enhancement based on deep neural networks. Recent studies typically utilize the compressed perceptually motivated features with relatively low frequency resolution to filter the full-band spectrum by one-stage networks, leading to limited speech quality improvements. In this paper, we propose a coordinated sub-band fusion network for full-band speech enhancement, which aims to recover the low- (0-8 kHz), middle- (8-16 kHz), and high-band (16-24 kHz) in a step-wise manner. Specifically, a dual-stream network is first pretrained to recover the low-band complex spectrum, and another two sub-networks are designed as the middle- and high-band noise suppressors in the magnitude-only domain. To fully capitalize on the information intercommunication, we employ a sub-band interaction module to provide external knowledge guidance across different frequency bands. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method yields consistent performance advantages over state-of-the-art full-band baselines.

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A deep complex multi-frame filtering network for stereophonic acoustic echo cancellation

In hands-free communication system, the coupling between loudspeaker and microphone generates echo signal, which can severely influence the quality of communication. Meanwhile, various types of noise in communication environments further reduce speech quality and intelligibility. It is difficult to extract the near-end signal from the microphone signal within one step, especially in low signal-to-noise ratio scenarios. In this paper, we propose a deep complex network approach to address this issue. Specially, we decompose the stereophonic acoustic echo cancellation into two stages, including linear stereophonic acoustic echo cancellation module and residual echo suppression module, where both modules are based on deep learning architectures. A multi-frame filtering strategy is introduced to benefit the estimation of linear echo by capturing more inter-frame information. Moreover, we decouple the complex spectral mapping into magnitude estimation and complex spectrum refinement. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves stage-of-the-art performance over previous advanced algorithms under various conditions.

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Taylor, Can You Hear Me Now? A Taylor-Unfolding Framework for Monaural Speech Enhancement

While the deep learning techniques promote the rapid development of the speech enhancement (SE) community, most schemes only pursue the performance in a black-box manner and lack adequate model interpretability. Inspired by Taylor's approximation theory, we propose an interpretable decoupling-style SE framework, which disentangles the complex spectrum recovery into two separate optimization problems \emph{i.e.}, magnitude and complex residual estimation. Specifically, serving as the 0th-order term in Taylor's series, a filter network is delicately devised to suppress the noise component only in the magnitude domain and obtain a coarse spectrum. To refine the phase distribution, we estimate the sparse complex residual, which is defined as the difference between target and coarse spectra, and measures the phase gap. In this study, we formulate the residual component as the combination of various high-order Taylor terms and propose a lightweight trainable module to replace the complicated derivative operator between adjacent terms. Finally, following Taylor's formula, we can reconstruct the target spectrum by the superimposition between 0th-order and high-order terms. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance over previous competing baselines in various evaluation metrics. The source code is available at github.com/Andong-Lispeech/TaylorSENet.

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MDNet: Learning Monaural Speech Enhancement from Deep Prior Gradient

While traditional statistical signal processing model-based methods can derive the optimal estimators relying on specific statistical assumptions, current learning-based methods further promote the performance upper bound via deep neural networks but at the expense of high encapsulation and lack adequate interpretability. Standing upon the intersection between traditional model-based methods and learning-based methods, we propose a model-driven approach based on the maximum a posteriori (MAP) framework, termed as MDNet, for single-channel speech enhancement. Specifically, the original problem is formulated into the joint posterior estimation w.r.t. speech and noise components. Different from the manual assumption toward the prior terms, we propose to model the prior distribution via networks and thus can learn from training data. The framework takes the unfolding structure and in each step, the target parameters can be progressively estimated through explicit gradient descent operations. Besides, another network serves as the fusion module to further refine the previous speech estimation. The experiments are conducted on the WSJ0-SI84 and Interspeech2020 DNS-Challenge datasets, and quantitative results show that the proposed approach outshines previous state-of-the-art baselines.

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TaylorBeamformer: Learning All-Neural Beamformer for Multi-Channel Speech Enhancement from Taylor's Approximation Theory

While existing end-to-end beamformers achieve impressive performance in various front-end speech processing tasks, they usually encapsulate the whole process into a black box and thus lack adequate interpretability. As an attempt to fill the blank, we propose a novel neural beamformer inspired by Taylor's approximation theory called TaylorBeamformer for multi-channel speech enhancement. The core idea is that the recovery process can be formulated as the spatial filtering in the neighborhood of the input mixture. Based on that, we decompose it into the superimposition of the 0th-order non-derivative and high-order derivative terms, where the former serves as the spatial filter and the latter is viewed as the residual noise canceller to further improve the speech quality. To enable end-to-end training, we replace the derivative operations with trainable networks and thus can learn from training data. Extensive experiments are conducted on the synthesized dataset based on LibriSpeech and results show that the proposed approach performs favorably against the previous advanced baselines.

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Joint magnitude estimation and phase recovery using Cycle-in-Cycle GAN for non-parallel speech enhancement

For the lack of adequate paired noisy-clean speech corpus in many real scenarios, non-parallel training is a promising task for DNN-based speech enhancement methods. However, because of the severe mismatch between input and target speeches, many previous studies only focus on the magnitude spectrum estimation and remain the phase unaltered, resulting in the degraded speech quality under low signal-to-noise ratio conditions. To tackle this problem, we decouple the difficult target w.r.t. original spectrum optimization into spectral magnitude and phase, and a novel Cycle-in-Cycle generative adversarial network (dubbed CinCGAN) is proposed to jointly estimate the spectral magnitude and phase information stage by stage under unpaired data. In the first stage, we pretrain a magnitude CycleGAN to coarsely estimate the spectral magnitude of clean speech. In the second stage, we incorporate the pretrained CycleGAN with a complex-valued CycleGAN as a cycle-in-cycle structure to simultaneously recover phase information and refine the overall spectrum. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms previous baselines under non-parallel training. The evaluation on training the models with standard paired data also shows that CinCGAN achieves remarkable performance especially in reducing background noise and speech distortion.

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Dual-branch Attention-In-Attention Transformer for single-channel speech enhancement

Curriculum learning begins to thrive in the speech enhancement area, which decouples the original spectrum estimation task into multiple easier sub-tasks to achieve better performance. Motivated by that, we propose a dual-branch attention-in-attention transformer dubbed DB-AIAT to handle both coarse- and fine-grained regions of the spectrum in parallel. From a complementary perspective, a magnitude masking branch is proposed to coarsely estimate the overall magnitude spectrum, and simultaneously a complex refining branch is elaborately designed to compensate for the missing spectral details and implicitly derive phase information. Within each branch, we propose a novel attention-in-attention transformer-based module to replace the conventional RNNs and temporal convolutional networks for temporal sequence modeling. Specifically, the proposed attention-in-attention transformer consists of adaptive temporal-frequency attention transformer blocks and an adaptive hierarchical attention module, aiming to capture long-term temporal-frequency dependencies and further aggregate global hierarchical contextual information. Experimental results on Voice Bank + DEMAND demonstrate that DB-AIAT yields state-of-the-art performance (e.g., 3.31 PESQ, 95.6% STOI and 10.79dB SSNR) over previous advanced systems with a relatively small model size (2.81M).

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Low-latency Monaural Speech Enhancement with Deep Filter-bank Equalizer

It is highly desirable that speech enhancement algorithms can achieve good performance while keeping low latency for many applications, such as digital hearing aids, acoustically transparent hearing devices, and public address systems. To improve the performance of traditional low-latency speech enhancement algorithms, a deep filter-bank equalizer (FBE) framework was proposed, which integrated a deep learning-based subband noise reduction network with a deep learning-based shortened digital filter mapping network. In the first network, a deep learning model was trained with a controllable small frame shift to satisfy the low-latency demand, i.e., $\le$ 4 ms, so as to obtain (complex) subband gains, which could be regarded as an adaptive digital filter in each frame. In the second network, to reduce the latency, this adaptive digital filter was implicitly shortened by a deep learning-based framework, and was then applied to noisy speech to reconstruct the enhanced speech without the overlap-add method. Experimental results on the WSJ0-SI84 corpus indicated that the proposed deep FBE with only 4-ms latency achieved much better performance than traditional low-latency speech enhancement algorithms in terms of the indices such as PESQ, STOI, and the amount of noise reduction.

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A Neural Beam Filter for Real-time Multi-channel Speech Enhancement

Most deep learning-based multi-channel speech enhancement methods focus on designing a set of beamforming coefficients to directly filter the low signal-to-noise ratio signals received by microphones, which hinders the performance of these approaches. To handle these problems, this paper designs a causal neural beam filter that fully exploits the spatial-spectral information in the beam domain. Specifically, multiple beams are designed to steer towards all directions using a parameterized super-directive beamformer in the first stage. After that, the neural spatial filter is learned by simultaneously modeling the spatial and spectral discriminability of the speech and the interference, so as to extract the desired speech coarsely in the second stage. Finally, to further suppress the interference components especially at low frequencies, a residual estimation module is adopted to refine the output of the second stage. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms many state-of-the-art multi-channel methods on the generated multi-channel speech dataset based on the DNS-Challenge dataset.

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EmotionBox: a music-element-driven emotional music generation system using Recurrent Neural Network

With the development of deep neural networks, automatic music composition has made great progress. Although emotional music can evoke listeners' different emotions and it is important for artistic expression, only few researches have focused on generating emotional music. This paper presents EmotionBox -an music-element-driven emotional music generator that is capable of composing music given a specific emotion, where this model does not require a music dataset labeled with emotions. Instead, pitch histogram and note density are extracted as features that represent mode and tempo respectively to control music emotions. The subjective listening tests show that the Emotionbox has a more competitive and balanced performance in arousing a specified emotion than the emotion-label-based method.

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Noise-robust blind reverberation time estimation using noise-aware time-frequency masking

The reverberation time is one of the most important parameters used to characterize the acoustic property of an enclosure. In real-world scenarios, it is much more convenient to estimate the reverberation time blindly from recorded speech compared to the traditional acoustic measurement techniques using professional measurement instruments. However, the recorded speech is often corrupted by noise, which has a detrimental effect on the estimation accuracy of the reverberation time. To address this issue, this paper proposes a two-stage blind reverberation time estimation method based on noise-aware time-frequency masking. This proposed method has a good ability to distinguish the reverberation tails from the noise, thus improving the estimation accuracy of reverberation time in noisy scenarios. The simulated and real-world acoustic experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms other methods in challenging scenarios.

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CycleGAN-based Non-parallel Speech Enhancement with an Adaptive Attention-in-attention Mechanism

Non-parallel training is a difficult but essential task for DNN-based speech enhancement methods, for the lack of adequate noisy and paired clean speech corpus in many real scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive attention-in-attention CycleGAN (AIA-CycleGAN) for non-parallel speech enhancement. In previous CycleGAN-based non-parallel speech enhancement methods, the limited mapping ability of the generator may cause performance degradation and insufficient feature learning. To alleviate this degradation, we propose an integration of adaptive time-frequency attention (ATFA) and adaptive hierarchical attention (AHA) to form an attention-in-attention (AIA) module for more flexible feature learning during the mapping procedure. More specifically, ATFA can capture the long-range temporal-spectral contextual information for more effective feature representations, while AHA can flexibly aggregate different AFTA's intermediate output feature maps by adaptive attention weights depending on the global context. Numerous experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves consistently more superior performance over previous GAN-based and CycleGAN-based methods in non-parallel training. Moreover, experiments in parallel training verify that the proposed AIA-CycleGAN also outperforms most advanced GAN-based and Non-GAN based speech enhancement approaches, especially in maintaining speech integrity and reducing speech distortion.

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A Two-stage Complex Network using Cycle-consistent Generative Adversarial Networks for Speech Enhancement

Cycle-consistent generative adversarial networks (CycleGAN) have shown their promising performance for speech enhancement (SE), while one intractable shortcoming of these CycleGAN-based SE systems is that the noise components propagate throughout the cycle and cannot be completely eliminated. Additionally, conventional CycleGAN-based SE systems only estimate the spectral magnitude, while the phase is unaltered. Motivated by the multi-stage learning concept, we propose a novel two-stage denoising system that combines a CycleGAN-based magnitude enhancing network and a subsequent complex spectral refining network in this paper. Specifically, in the first stage, a CycleGAN-based model is responsible for only estimating magnitude, which is subsequently coupled with the original noisy phase to obtain a coarsely enhanced complex spectrum. After that, the second stage is applied to further suppress the residual noise components and estimate the clean phase by a complex spectral mapping network, which is a pure complex-valued network composed of complex 2D convolution/deconvolution and complex temporal-frequency attention blocks. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently surpasses previous one-stage CycleGANs and other state-of-the-art SE systems in terms of various evaluation metrics, especially in background noise suppression.

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Embedding and Beamforming: All-neural Causal Beamformer for Multichannel Speech Enhancement

The spatial covariance matrix has been considered to be significant for beamformers. Standing upon the intersection of traditional beamformers and deep neural networks, we propose a causal neural beamformer paradigm called Embedding and Beamforming, and two core modules are designed accordingly, namely EM and BM. For EM, instead of estimating spatial covariance matrix explicitly, the 3-D embedding tensor is learned with the network, where both spectral and spatial discriminative information can be represented. For BM, a network is directly leveraged to derive the beamforming weights so as to implement filter-and-sum operation. To further improve the speech quality, a post-processing module is introduced to further suppress the residual noise. Based on the DNS-Challenge dataset, we conduct the experiments for multichannel speech enhancement and the results show that the proposed system outperforms previous advanced baselines by a large margin in multiple evaluation metrics.

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