Reverberant Speech Segregation Based on Multipitch Tracking and Classification

Room reverberation creates a major challenge to speech segregation. We propose a computational auditory scene analysis approach to monaural segregation of reverberant voiced speech, which performs multipitch tracking of reverberant mixtures and supervised classification. Speech and nonspeech models are separately trained, and each learns to map from a set of pitch-based features to a grouping cue which encodes the posterior probability of a time-frequency (T-F) unit being dominated by the source with the given pitch estimate. Because interference may be either speech or nonspeech, a likelihood ratio test selects the correct model for labeling corresponding T-F units. Experimental results show that the proposed system performs robustly in different types of interference and various reverberant conditions, and has a significant advantage over existing systems.