FlexIO: Flexible Single- and Multi-Channel Speech Separation and Enhancement

TL;DR

FlexIO is a versatile speech separation and enhancement system capable of handling varying numbers of speakers and microphone configurations, demonstrating robustness across diverse real-world conditions.

Contribution

The paper introduces FlexIO, a novel flexible SSE system that unifies single- and multi-channel separation with conditional prompts for arbitrary speaker counts.

Findings

Successfully separates 1-5 microphones and 1-3 speakers.

Demonstrates robustness on CHiME-4 real data.

Unifies single- and multi-channel SSE approaches.

Abstract

Speech separation and enhancement (SSE) has advanced remarkably and achieved promising results in controlled settings, such as a fixed number of speakers and a fixed array configuration. Towards a universal SSE system, single-channel systems have been extended to deal with a variable number of speakers (i.e., outputs). Meanwhile, multi-channel systems accommodating various array configurations (i.e., inputs) have been developed. However, these attempts have been pursued separately. In this paper, we propose a flexible input and output SSE system, named FlexIO. It performs conditional separation using prompt vectors, one per speaker as a condition, allowing separation of an arbitrary number of speakers. Multi-channel mixtures are processed together with the prompt vectors via an array-agnostic channel communication mechanism. Our experiments demonstrate that FlexIO successfully covers diverse conditions with one to five microphones and one to three speakers. We also confirm the robustness of FlexIO on CHiME-4 real data.