Speech enhancement using Long Short-Term Memory based recurrent Neural Networks for noise robust Speaker Verification

Abstract

In this paper we propose to use a state-of-the-art Deep Recurrent Neural Network (DRNN) based Speech Enhancement (SE) algorithm for noise robust Speaker Verification (SV). Specifically, we study the performance of an i-vector based SV system, when tested in noisy conditions using a DRNN based SE front-end utilizing a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architecture. We make comparisons to systems using a Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) based front-end, and a Short-Time Spectral Amplitude Minimum Mean Square Error (STSA-MMSE) based front-end, respectively. We show in simulation experiments that a male-speaker and text-independent DRNN based SE front-end, without specific a priori knowledge about the noise type outperforms a text, noise type and speaker dependent NMF based front-end as well as a STSA-MMSE based front-end in terms of Equal Error Rates for a large range of noise types and signal to noise ratios on the RSR2015 speech corpus.