Real-time Speaker counting in a cocktail party scenario using Attention-guided Convolutional Neural Network
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Most current speech technology systems are designed to operate well even in the presence of multiple active speakers. However, most solutions assume that the number of co-current speakers is known. Unfortunately, this information might not always be available in real-world applications. In this study, we propose a real-time, single-channel attention-guided Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to estimate the number of active speakers in overlapping speech. The proposed system extracts higher-level information from the speech spectral content using a CNN model. Next, the attention mechanism summarizes the extracted information into a compact feature vector without losing critical information. Finally, the active speakers are classified using a fully connected network. Experiments on simulated overlapping speech using WSJ corpus show that the attention solution is shown to improve the performance by almost 3 Attention-guided CNN achieves 76.15 Recall, and 75.80 200 ms). All the classification metrics exceed 92 model in offline scenarios where the input signal is more than 100 frames long (i.e., 1s).
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