A Pitch-aware Approach to Single-channel Speech Separation

Despite significant advancements of deep learning on separating speech sources mixed in a single channel, same gender speaker mix, i.e., male-male or female-female, is still more difficult to separate than the case of opposite gender mix. In this study, we propose a pitch-aware speech separation approach to improve the speech separation performance. The proposed approach performs speech separation in the following steps: 1) training a pre-separation model to separate the mixed sources; 2) training a pitch-tracking network to perform polyphonic pitch tracking; 3) incorporating the estimated pitch for the final pitch-aware speech separation. Experimental results of the new approach, tested on the WSJ0-2mix public dataset, show that the new approach improves speech separation performance for both same and opposite gender mixture. The improved performance in signal-to-distortion (SDR) of 12.0 dB is the best reported result without using any phase enhancement.