Spot keywords from very noisy and mixed speech

05/28/2023

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by   Ying Shi, et al.

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Most existing keyword spotting research focuses on conditions with slight or moderate noise. In this paper, we try to tackle a more challenging task: detecting keywords buried under strong interfering speech (10 times higher than the keyword in amplitude), and even worse, mixed with other keywords. We propose a novel Mix Training (MT) strategy that encourages the model to discover low-energy keywords from noisy and mixed speech. Experiments were conducted with a vanilla CNN and two EfficientNet (B0/B2) architectures. The results evaluated with the Google Speech Command dataset demonstrated that the proposed mix training approach is highly effective and outperforms standard data augmentation and mixup training.