Multi-microphone speech separation
AssigneeMicrosoft Technology Licensing, LLC
InventorsZhuo CHEN, Hakan ERDOGAN, Takuya YOSHIOKA, Fileno A. ALLEVA, Xiong XIAO
Life of this patent
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Abstract
This document relates to separation of audio signals into speaker-specific signals. One example obtains features reflecting mixed speech signals captured by multiple microphones. The features can be input a neural network and masks can be obtained from the neural network. The masks can be applied one or more of the mixed speech signals captured by one or more of the microphones to obtain two or more separate speaker-specific speech signals, which can then be output.
Claims20
A method performed on a computing device, the method comprising:
- obtaining features reflecting mixed speech signals captured by multiple microphones;
- inputting the features to a neural network;
- obtaining masks output by the neural network;
- applying the masks to at least one of the mixed speech signals captured by at least one of the microphones to obtain two or more separate speaker-specific speech signals;
- and
- outputting the two or more separate speaker-specific speech signals.
A system comprising:
- a hardware processing unit;
- and
- a storage resource storing computer-readable instructions which, when executed by the hardware processing unit, cause the hardware processing unit to:
- obtain features reflecting multiple mixed speech signals captured by multiple microphones;
- normalize the features to obtain normalized features;
- input the normalized features to a speech separation model;
- obtain, from the speech separation model, respective masks for individual speakers;
- and
- apply the respective masks to at least one of the mixed speech signals to obtain at least two separate speaker-specific speech signals for different speakers.
A computer-readable storage medium storing instructions which, when executed by a processing device, cause the processing device to perform acts comprising:
- obtaining speaker-specific masks from a speech separation model, the speech separation model producing the speaker-specific masks from input of at least two different microphones;
- using the speaker-specific masks to derive respective speaker-specific beamformed signals;
- performing gain adjustment on the respective speaker-specific beamformed signals to obtain gain-adjusted speaker-specific beamformed signals;
- and
- outputting the gain-adjusted speaker-specific beamformed signals.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.