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HiFi-GAN-2: Studio-quality speech enhancement via generative adversarial networks conditioned on acoustic features

IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA)

Publication date: October 17, 2021

Jiaqi Su, Zeyu Jin, Adam Finkelstein

Modern speech content creation tasks such as podcasts, video voice-overs, and audiobooks require studio-quality audio with full bandwidth and balanced equalization (EQ). These goals pose a challenge for conventional speech enhancement methods, which typically focus on removing significant acoustic degradation such as noise and reverb so as to improve speech clarity and intelligibility. We present HiFi-GAN-2, a waveform-to-waveform enhancement method that improves the quality of real-world consumer-grade recordings, with moderate noise, reverb, and EQ distortion, to sound like studio recordings. HiFi-GAN-2 has three components. First, given a noisy reverberant recording as input, a recurrent network predicts the acoustic features (MFCCs) of a clean signal. Second, given the same noisy input, and conditioned on the MFCCs output by the first network, a feed-forward WaveNet (modeled via multi-domain multi-scale adversarial training) generates a clean 16kHz signal. Third, a pre-trained bandwidth extension network generates the final 48kHz studio-quality signal from the 16kHz output of the second network. The complete pipeline is trained via simulation of noise, reverb and EQ added to studio-quality speech. Objective and subjective evaluations show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on both conventional denoising as well as joint dereverberation and denoising tasks. Listening tests also show that our method achieves close to studio quality on real-world speech content (TED Talks and the VoxCeleb dataset).

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Research Areas:  Adobe Research iconAI & Machine Learning Adobe Research iconAudio