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We present new results on single-channel speech separation and suggest a new separation approach to improve the speech quality of separated signals from an observed mixture. The key idea is to derive a mixture estimator based on sinusoidal parameters. The proposed estimator is aimed at finding sinusoidal parameters in the form of codevectors from vector quantization (VQ) codebooks pre-trained for speakers that, when combined, best fit the observed mixed signal. The selected codevectors are then used to reconstruct the recovered signals for the speakers in the mixture. Compared to the log-max mixture estimator used in binary masks and the Wiener filtering approach, it is observed that the proposed method achieves an acceptable perceptual speech quality with less cross-talk at different signal-to-signal ratios. Moreover, the method is independent of pitch estimates and reduces the computational complexity of the separation by replacing the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) feature vectors of high dimensionality with sinusoidal feature vectors. We report separation results for the proposed method and compare them with respect to other benchmark methods. The improvements made by applying the proposed method over other methods are confirmed by employing perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) as an objective measure and a MUSHRA listening test as a subjective evaluation for both speaker-dependent and gender-dependent scenarios.

In conventional single-channel speech enhancement, typically the noisy spectral amplitude is modified while the noisy phase is used to reconstruct the enhanced signal. Several recent attempts have shown the effectiveness of utilizing an improved spectral phase for phase-aware speech enhancement and consequently its positive impact on the perceived speech quality. In this paper, we present a harmonic phase estimation method relying on fundamental frequency and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) information estimated from noisy speech. The proposed method relies on SNR-based time-frequency smoothing of the unwrapped phase obtained from the decomposition of the noisy phase. To incorporate the uncertainty in the estimated phase due to unreliable voicing decision and SNR estimate, we propose a binary hypothesis test assuming speech-present and speech-absent classes representing high and low SNRs. The effectiveness of the proposed phase estimation method is evaluated for both phase-only enhancement of noisy speech and in combination with an amplitude-only enhancement scheme. We show that by enhancing the noisy phase both perceived speech quality as well as speech intelligibility are improved as predicted by the instrumental metrics and justified by subjective listening tests.

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Sum-product networks (SPNs) are a recently proposed type of probabilistic graphical models allowing complex variable interactions while still granting efficient inference. In this paper we demonstrate the suitability of SPNs for modeling log-spectra of speech signals using the application of artificial bandwidth extension, i.e. artificially replacing the high-frequency content which is lost in telephone signals. We use SPNs as observation models in hidden Markov models (HMMs), which model the temporal evolution of log short-time spectra. Missing frequency bins are replaced by the SPNs using most-probable-explanation inference, where the state-dependent reconstructions are weighted with the HMM state posterior. According to subjective listening and objective evaluation, our system consistently and significantly improves the state of the art.

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