Blind source separation and visual voice activity detection for target speech extraction

Despite being studied extensively, the performance of blind source separation (BSS) is still limited especially for the sensor data collected in adverse environments. Recent studies show that such an issue can be mitigated by incorporating multimodal information into the BSS process. In this paper, we propose a method for the enhancement of the target speech separated by a BSS algorithm from sound mixtures, using visual voice activity detection (VAD) and spectral subtraction. First, a classifier for visual VAD is formed in the off-line training stage, using labelled features extracted from the visual stimuli. Then we use this visual VAD classifier to detect the voice activity of the target speech. Finally we apply a multi-band spectral subtraction algorithm to enhance the BSS-separated speech signal based on the detected voice activity. We have tested our algorithm on the mixtures generated artificially by the mixing filters with different reverberation times, and the results show that our algorithm improves the quality of the separated target signal. © 2011 IEEE