DNN-Based Speech Enhancement Using Soft Audible Noise Masking for Wind Noise Reduction

This paper presents a deep neural network(DNN)-based speech enhancement algorithm based on the soft audible noise masking for the single-channel wind noise reduction. To reduce the low-frequency residual noise, the psychoacoustic model is adopted to calculate the masking threshold from the estimated clean speech spectrum. The gain for noise suppression is obtained based on soft audible noise masking by comparing the estimated wind noise spectrum with the masking threshold. To deal with the abruptly time-varying noisy signals, two separate DNN models are utilized to estimate the spectra of clean speech and wind noise components. Experimental results on the subjective and objective quality tests show that the proposed algorithm achieves the better performance compared with the conventional DNN-based wind noise reduction method.

Multi-Axis Attention With Convolution Parallel Block for Organoid Segmentation

Dear Editor,This letter presents an organoid segmentation model based on multi-axis attention with convolution parallel block.MACPNet adeptly captures dynamic dependencies within bright-field microscopy images,improving global modeling beyond conventional UNet.

Investigation of Knowledge Transfer Approaches to Improve the Acoustic Modeling of Vietnamese ASR System

It is well known that automatic speech recognition(ASR) is a resource consuming task. It takes sufficient amount of data to train a state-of-the-art deep neural network acoustic model. As for some low-resource languages where scripted speech is difficult to obtain, data sparsity is the main problem that limits the performance of speech recognition system. In this paper, several knowledge transfer methods are investigated to overcome the data sparsity problem with the help of high-resource languages.The first one is a pre-training and fine-tuning(PT/FT) method, in which the parameters of hidden layers are initialized with a welltrained neural network. Secondly, the progressive neural networks(Prognets) are investigated. With the help of lateral connections in the network architecture, Prognets are immune to forgetting effect and superior in knowledge transferring. Finally,bottleneck features(BNF) are extracted using cross-lingual deep neural networks and serves as an enhanced feature to improve the performance of ASR system. Experiments are conducted in a low-resource Vietnamese dataset. The results show that all three methods yield significant gains over the baseline system, and the Prognets acoustic model performs the best. Further improvements can be obtained by combining the Prognets model and bottleneck features.