arXiv subjects

Tanel Parnamaa

Publications and source records attributed to Tanel Parnamaa.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2023

ICASSP 2023 Acoustic Echo Cancellation Challenge

The ICASSP 2023 Acoustic Echo Cancellation Challenge is intended to stimulate research in acoustic echo cancellation (AEC), which is an important area of speech enhancement and is still a top issue in audio communication. This is the fourth AEC challenge and it is enhanced by adding a second track for personalized acoustic echo cancellation, reducing the algorithmic + buffering latency to 20ms, as well as including a full-band version of AECMOS. We open source two large datasets to train AEC models under both single talk and double talk scenarios. These datasets consist of recordings from more than 10,000 real audio devices and human speakers in real environments, as well as a synthetic dataset. We open source an online subjective test framework and provide an objective metric for researchers to quickly test their results. The winners of this challenge were selected based on the average mean opinion score (MOS) achieved across all scenarios and the word accuracy (WAcc) rate.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2023

DeepVQE: Real Time Deep Voice Quality Enhancement for Joint Acoustic Echo Cancellation, Noise Suppression and Dereverberation

Acoustic echo cancellation (AEC), noise suppression (NS) and dereverberation (DR) are an integral part of modern full-duplex communication systems. As the demand for teleconferencing systems increases, addressing these tasks is required for an effective and efficient online meeting experience. Most prior research proposes solutions for these tasks separately, combining them with digital signal processing (DSP) based components, resulting in complex pipelines that are often impractical to deploy in real-world applications. This paper proposes a real-time cross-attention deep model, named DeepVQE, based on residual convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to simultaneously address AEC, NS, and DR. We conduct several ablation studies to analyze the contributions of different components of our model to the overall performance. DeepVQE achieves state-of-the-art performance on non-personalized tracks from the ICASSP 2023 Acoustic Echo Cancellation Challenge and ICASSP 2023 Deep Noise Suppression Challenge test sets, showing that a single model can handle multiple tasks with excellent performance. Moreover, the model runs in real-time and has been successfully tested for the Microsoft Teams platform.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2023

Real-Time Joint Personalized Speech Enhancement and Acoustic Echo Cancellation

Personalized speech enhancement (PSE) is a real-time SE approach utilizing a speaker embedding of a target person to remove background noise, reverberation, and interfering voices. To deploy a PSE model for full duplex communications, the model must be combined with acoustic echo cancellation (AEC), although such a combination has been less explored. This paper proposes a series of methods that are applicable to various model architectures to develop efficient causal models that can handle the tasks of PSE, AEC, and joint PSE-AEC. We present extensive evaluation results using both simulated data and real recordings, covering various acoustic conditions and evaluation metrics. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed methods for two different model architectures. Our best joint PSE-AEC model comes close to the expert models optimized for individual tasks of PSE and AEC in their respective scenarios and significantly outperforms the expert models for the combined PSE-AEC task.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2022

ICASSP 2022 Acoustic Echo Cancellation Challenge

The ICASSP 2022 Acoustic Echo Cancellation Challenge is intended to stimulate research in acoustic echo cancellation (AEC), which is an important area of speech enhancement and still a top issue in audio communication. This is the third AEC challenge and it is enhanced by including mobile scenarios, adding speech recognition rate in the challenge goal metrics, and making the default sample rate 48 kHz. In this challenge, we open source two large datasets to train AEC models under both single talk and double talk scenarios. These datasets consist of recordings from more than 10,000 real audio devices and human speakers in real environments, as well as a synthetic dataset. We also open source an online subjective test framework and provide an online objective metric service for researchers to quickly test their results. The winners of this challenge are selected based on the average Mean Opinion Score achieved across all different single talk and double talk scenarios, and the speech recognition word acceptance rate.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2020

ICASSP 2021 Acoustic Echo Cancellation Challenge: Datasets, Testing Framework, and Results

The ICASSP 2021 Acoustic Echo Cancellation Challenge is intended to stimulate research in the area of acoustic echo cancellation (AEC), which is an important part of speech enhancement and still a top issue in audio communication and conferencing systems. Many recent AEC studies report good performance on synthetic datasets where the train and test samples come from the same underlying distribution. However, the AEC performance often degrades significantly on real recordings. Also, most of the conventional objective metrics such as echo return loss enhancement (ERLE) and perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) do not correlate well with subjective speech quality tests in the presence of background noise and reverberation found in realistic environments. In this challenge, we open source two large datasets to train AEC models under both single talk and double talk scenarios. These datasets consist of recordings from more than 2,500 real audio devices and human speakers in real environments, as well as a synthetic dataset. We open source two large test sets, and we open source an online subjective test framework for researchers to quickly test their results. The winners of this challenge will be selected based on the average Mean Opinion Score (MOS) achieved across all different single talk and double talk scenarios.

eess.AS↗