Furcax: End-to-end Monaural Speech Separation Based on Deep Gated (De)convolutional Neural Networks with Adversarial Example Training

Deep gated convolutional networks have been proved to be very effective in single channel speech separation. However current state-of-the-art framework often considers training the gated convolutional networks in time-frequency (TF) domain. Such an approach will result in limited perceptual score, such as signal-to-distortion ratio (SDR) upper bound of separated utterances and also fail to exploit an end-to-end framework. In this paper we present an integrated simple and effective end-to-end approach called FurcaX¹ to monaural speech separation, which consists of deep gated (de)convolutional neural networks (GCNN) that takes the mixed utterance of two speakers and maps it to two separated utterances, where each utterance contains only one speaker's voice. For the objective, we propose to train the network by directly optimizing utterance level SDR in a permutation invariant training (PIT) style. We execute generative adversarial training (GAT) throughout the training, which makes the separated speech indistinguishable from the real one. Our experiments on the the public WSJ0-2mix data corpus demonstrate that this new scheme can produce more discriminative separated utterances and leading to performance improvement on the speaker separation task.