NARA-WPE: A Python package for weighted prediction error dereverberation in Numpy and Tensorflow for online and offline processing

Conference: Speech Communication - 13. ITG-Fachtagung Sprachkommunikation
10/10/2018 - 10/12/2018 at Oldenburg, Deutschland

Proceedings: Speech Communication

Pages: 5Language: englishTyp: PDF

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Authors:
Drude, Lukas; Heymann, Jahn; Boeddeker, Christoph; Haeb-Umbach, Reinhold (Paderborn University, Department of Communications Engineering, Paderborn, Germany)

Abstract:
NARA-WPE is a Python software package providing implementations of the weighted prediction error (WPE) dereverberation algorithm. WPE has been shown to be a highly effective tool for speech dereverberation, thus improving the perceptual quality of the signal and improving the recognition performance of downstream automatic speech recognition (ASR). It is suitable both for single-channel and multi-channel applications. The package consist of (1) a Numpy implementation which can easily be integrated into a custom Python toolchain, and (2) a TensorFlow implementation which allows integration into larger computational graphs and enables backpropagation through WPE to train more advanced front-ends. This package comprises of an iterative offline (batch) version, a block-online version, and a frame-online version which can be used in moderately low latency applications, e.g. digital speech assistants.