TDFNet: An Efficient Audio-Visual Speech Separation Model with Top-down Fusion

Audio-visual speech separation has gained significant traction in recent years due to its potential applications in various fields such as speech recognition, diarization, scene analysis and assistive technologies. Designing a lightweight audio-visual speech separation network is important for low-latency applications, but existing methods often require higher computational costs and more parameters to achieve better separation performance. In this paper, we present an audio-visual speech separation model called Top-Down-Fusion Net (TDFNet), a state-of-the-art (SOTA) model for audio-visual speech separation, which builds upon the architecture of TDANet, an audio-only speech separation method. TDANet serves as the architectural foundation for the auditory and visual networks within TDFNet, offering an efficient model with fewer parameters. On the LRS2-2Mix dataset, TDFNet achieves a performance increase of up to 10% across all performance metrics compared with the previous SOTA method CTCNet. Remarkably, these results are achieved using fewer parameters and only 28% of the multiply-accumulate operations (MACs) of CTCNet. In essence, our method presents a highly effective and efficient solution to the challenges of speech separation within the audio-visual domain, making significant strides in harnessing visual information optimally.