Cognitive computing · 2018-04-16

Google research has found a way to isolate voices in a crowded room – News

Yes, you read the headline right. Google’s team of researchers have found a way where, using deep learning, a computer can isolate an individual’s voice in a crowded room.

It works just like the human brain’s ability to zero on a particular voice in a room like say a pub or a party hall. Known as the cocktail party effect, this capability comes natural to us humans. However, automatic speech separation — separating an audio signal into its individual speech sources — while a well-studied problem, remains a significant challenge for computers. Google has now solved that problem.

Here’s what it wrote on its official blog:

In “Looking to Listen at the Cocktail Party”, we present a deep learning audio-visual model for isolating a single speech signal from a mixture of sounds such as other voices and background noise. In this work, we are able to computationally produce videos in which speech of specific people is enhanced while all other sounds are suppressed. Our method works on ordinary videos with a single audio track, and all that is required from the user is to select the face of the person in the video they want to hear, or to have such a person be selected algorithmically based on context. We believe this capability can have a wide range of applications, from speech enhancement and recognition in videos, through video conferencing, to improved hearing aids, especially in situations where there are multiple people speaking.

A unique aspect of our technique is in combining both the auditory and visual signals of an input video to separate the speech. Intuitively, movements of a person’s mouth, for example, should correlate with the sounds produced as that person is speaking, which in turn can help identify which parts of the audio correspond to that person. The visual signal not only improves the speech separation quality significantly in cases of mixed speech (compared to speech separation using audio alone, as we demonstrate in our paper), but, importantly, it also associates the separated, clean speech tracks with the visible speakers in the video.


 

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