publications

2022

1. MLSP

   An Efficient Transformer-Based Model for Voice Activity Detection

   Yifei Zhao, and Benoit Champagne

   In 2022 IEEE 32nd International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP), Aug 2022

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   Voice Activity Detection (VAD) aims to distinguish, at a given time, between desired speech and non-speech. Although many state-of-the-art approaches for increasing the performance of VAD have been proposed, they are still not robust enough to be applied under adverse noise conditions with low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR). To deal with this issue, we propose a novel transformer-based architecture for VAD with reduced computational complexity by implementing efficient depth-wise convolutions on feature patches. The proposed model, named Tr-VAD, demonstrates better performance compared to baseline methods from the literature in a variety of scenarios considered with the smallest possible number of parameters. The results also indicate that the use of a combination of Audio Fingerprinting (AFP) features with Tr-VAD can guarantee better performance.

2. ICASSP

   Complex IRM-Aware Training for Voice Activity Detection Using Attention Model

   Yifei Zhao, Yazid Attabi, Benoit Champagne, and 1 more author

   In ICASSP 2022 - 2022 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), May 2022

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   Although many state-of-the-art approaches for improving the accuracy of Voice Activity Detection (VAD) have been proposed, their performance under adverse noise conditions with low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) remains limited. In this paper, we introduce a novel attention model-based deep neural network (DNN) architecture for VAD which takes advantage of complex Ideal Ratio Mask (cIRM). The proposed model, named AM-cIRM, consists of three sequential modules: extraction of cIRM features from the noisy speech using a DNN-based architecture; combination of cIRM with log-Mel spectrogram features along with temporal contextual extension; and VAD using an attention model that exploits the spectro-temporal information in the transformed features. Experimental results show that the proposed AM-cIRM achieves improved VAD performance when compared to state-of-the-art methods under different noise conditions.