Dear subscribers of the colloquium newsletter,

we are pleased to announce the next date of our Communication Technology Colloquium:

Friday, July 9, 2021
Speaker: Marc Mittag
Time: 3:30 p.m.
Location: https://rwth.zoom.us/j/97904157921?pwd=SWpsbDl0MWhrWjY1ZkZaeFRoYmErZz09

                    Meeting-ID: 979 0415 7921
                    Passwort: 481650

Master-Lecture: Deep Speech Inpainting for Masks Resulting from Noisy Spectra

Speech enhancement belongs to the domain of noise detection, estimation and reductionwith the goal of increasing speech quality and intelligibility for speech signals subject toenvironmental noise. However, conventional methods typically insufficiently remove noisein challenging low-SNRnon-stationary noise environments.

In this thesis, we explore a twostage speech enhancement method utilizing the strengths of machine learning and deep speechinpainting for these difficult scenarios. Consisting out of a masking and inpainting stage,we deploy two powerful residualCNNs in an encoder-decoder structure, one for each stage.The purpose of the first stage is to mask a noisy-speech magnitude spectrogram using binarymasking such that it sufficiently removes noise but retains most of the important speechinformation. The second stage deals with reconstruction of the previously removedT-Fpointswith the goal of creating a corruption-free, continuous clean-speech signal. The results showthat our approach outperforms conventional speech enhancement methods and achieves similarstate-of-the-art performance regarding other speech inpainting studies. Compared to thenoisy-speech signal, our approach achieves up to 3 times higherPESQscores and substantialSNRimprovements of several decibels on ideal conditions. Furthermore, we demonstrate thatthe inpainting neural network can inpaint even highly masked speech if specifically trained for.

All interested parties are cordially invited, registration is not required.

General information about the colloquium as well as a current time scale of the Communication Technology Colloquium can be found at:
https://www.iks.rwth-aachen.de/aktuelles/kolloquium

-- 
Irina Ronkartz
Institute of Communication Systems (IKS)
RWTH Aachen University
Muffeter Weg 3a, 52074 Aachen, Germany
+49 241 80 26958 (phone)
ronkartz@iks.rwth-aachen.de
http://www.iks.rwth-aachen.de/