Segregation of unvoiced speech from nonspeech interference

Abstract

Monaural speech segregation has proven to be extremely challenging. While efforts in computational auditory scene analysis have led to considerable progress in voiced speech segregation, little attention has been given to unvoiced speech, which lacks harmonic structure and has weaker energy, hence more susceptible to interference. This study proposes a new approach to the problem of segregating unvoiced speech from nonspeech interference. The study first addresses the question of how much speech is unvoiced. The segregation process occurs in two stages: Segmentation and grouping. In segmentation, the proposed model decomposes an input mixture into contiguous time-frequency segments by a multiscale analysis of event onsets and offsets. Grouping of unvoiced segments is based on Bayesian classification of acoustic-phonetic features. The proposed model for unvoiced speech segregation joins an existing model for voiced speech segregation to produce an overall system that can deal with both voiced and unvoiced speech. Systematic evaluation shows that the proposed system extracts a majority of unvoiced speech without including much interference, and it performs substantially better than spectral subtraction.