ISCA Archive Interspeech 2025
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2025

CabinSep: IR-Augmented Mask-Based MVDR for Real-Time In-car Speech Separation with Distributed Heterogeneous Arrays

Runduo Han, Yanxin Hu, Yihui Fu, Zihan Zhang, Yukai Jv, Li Chen, Lei Xie

Separating overlapping speech from multiple speakers is crucial for effective human-vehicle interaction. This paper proposes CabinSep, a lightweight neural mask-based minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) speech separation approach, to reduce speech recognition errors in back-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) models. Our contributions are threefold: First, we utilize channel information to extract spatial features, which improves the estimation of speech and noise masks. Second, we employ MVDR during inference, reducing speech distortion to make it more ASR-friendly. Third, we introduce a data augmentation method combining simulated and real-recorded impulse responses (IRs), improving speaker localization at zone boundaries and further reducing speech recognition errors. With a computational complexity of only 0.4 GMACs, CabinSep achieves a 17.5% relative reduction in speech recognition error rate in a real-recorded dataset compared to the state-of-the-art DualSep model.