Abstract:
Accurate estimation of Room Impulse Response (RIR), which captures an environment's acoustic properties, can aid in synthesizing speech as if it were spoken in that environment. We propose AV-RIR, a novel multi-modal multi-task learning approach to accurately estimate the RIR from a given reverberant speech signal and the visual cues of its corresponding environment. AV-RIR builds on a novel neural architecture that effectively captures environment geometry and materials properties and solves speech dereverberation as an auxiliary task. We also propose Geo-Mat features that augment material information into visual cues and CRIP that improves late reverberation components in the estimated RIR via image-to-RIR retrieval by 86\%. Empirical results show that AV-RIR quantitatively outperforms previous audio-only and visual-only approaches by achieving 36\% - 63\% improvement across various acoustic metrics in RIR estimation. Additionally, it also achieves higher preference scores in human evaluation. As an auxiliary benefit, dereverbed speech from AV-RIR shows competitive performance with the state-of-the-art in a variety of spoken language processing tasks and outperforms $T_{60}$ error score in the real-world AVSpeech dataset. Code and qualitative examples of both synthesized reverberant speech and enhanced speech can be found in the supplementary.
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