MSFNet: Multi-Scale Fusion Network for Brain-Controlled Speaker Extraction

Speaker extraction aims to selectively extract the target speaker from the multi-talker environment under the guidance of auxiliary reference. Recent studies have shown that the attended speaker's information can be decoded by the auditory attention decoding from the listener's brain activity. However, how to more effectively utilize the common information about the target speaker contained in both electroencephalography (EEG) and speech is still an unresolved problem. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale fusion network (MSFNet) for brain-controlled speaker extraction, which utilizes the EEG recorded from the listener to extract the target speech. In order to make full use of the speech information, the mixed speech is encoded with multiple time scales so that the multi-scale embeddings are acquired. In addition, to effectively extract the non-Euclidean data of EEG, the graph convolutional networks are used as the EEG encoder. Finally, these multi-scale embeddings are separately fused with the EEG features. To facilitate research related to auditory attention decoding and further validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we also construct the AVED dataset, a new EEG-Audio dataset. Experimental results on both the public Cocktail Party dataset and the newly proposed AVED dataset in this paper show that our MSFNet model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art method in certain objective evaluation metrics.