ISCA Archive Interspeech 2019
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2019

VoiceFilter: Targeted Voice Separation by Speaker-Conditioned Spectrogram Masking

Quan Wang, Hannah Muckenhirn, Kevin Wilson, Prashant Sridhar, Zelin Wu, John R. Hershey, Rif A. Saurous, Ron J. Weiss, Ye Jia, Ignacio Lopez Moreno

In this paper, we present a novel system that separates the voice of a target speaker from multi-speaker signals, by making use of a reference signal from the target speaker. We achieve this by training two separate neural networks: (1) A speaker recognition network that produces speaker-discriminative embeddings; (2) A spectrogram masking network that takes both noisy spectrogram and speaker embedding as input, and produces a mask. Our system significantly reduces the speech recognition WER on multi-speaker signals, with minimal WER degradation on single-speaker signals.