Multi-channel Replay Speech Detection using an Adaptive Learnable Beamformer

Replay attacks belong to the class of severe threats against voice-controlled systems, exploiting the easy accessibility of speech signals by recorded and replayed speech to grant unauthorized access to sensitive data. In this work, we propose a multi-channel neural network architecture called M-ALRAD for the detection of replay attacks based on spatial audio features. This approach integrates a learnable adaptive beamformer with a convolutional recurrent neural network, allowing for joint optimization of spatial filtering and classification. Experiments have been carried out on the ReMASC dataset, which is a state-of-the-art multi-channel replay speech detection dataset encompassing four microphones with diverse array configurations and four environments. Results on the ReMASC dataset show the superiority of the approach compared to the state-of-the-art and yield substantial improvements for challenging acoustic environments. In addition, we demonstrate that our approach is able to better generalize to unseen environments with respect to prior studies.

Low-complexity Attention-based Unsupervised Anomalous Sound Detection exploiting Separable Convolutions and Angular Loss

In this work, a novel deep neural network, designed to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of unsupervised sound anomaly detection, is presented. The proposed model exploits an attention module and separable convolutions to identify salient time-frequency patterns in audio data to discriminate between normal and anomalous sounds with reduced computational complexity. The approach is validated through extensive experiments using the Task 2 dataset of the DCASE 2020 challenge. Results demonstrate superior performance in terms of anomaly detection accuracy while having fewer parameters than state-of-the-art methods. Implementation details, code, and pre-trained models are available in https://github.com/michaelneri/unsupervised-audio-anomaly-detection.

Speaker Distance Estimation in Enclosures from Single-Channel Audio

Distance estimation from audio plays a crucial role in various applications, such as acoustic scene analysis, sound source localization, and room modeling. Most studies predominantly center on employing a classification approach, where distances are discretized into distinct categories, enabling smoother model training and achieving higher accuracy but imposing restrictions on the precision of the obtained sound source position. Towards this direction, in this paper we propose a novel approach for continuous distance estimation from audio signals using a convolutional recurrent neural network with an attention module. The attention mechanism enables the model to focus on relevant temporal and spectral features, enhancing its ability to capture fine-grained distance-related information. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments using audio recordings in controlled environments with three levels of realism (synthetic room impulse response, measured response with convolved speech, and real recordings) on four datasets (our synthetic dataset, QMULTIMIT, VoiceHome-2, and STARSS23). Experimental results show that the model achieves an absolute error of 0.11 meters in a noiseless synthetic scenario. Moreover, the results showed an absolute error of about 1.30 meters in the hybrid scenario. The algorithm's performance in the real scenario, where unpredictable environmental factors and noise are prevalent, yields an absolute error of approximately 0.50 meters. For reproducible research purposes we make model, code, and synthetic datasets available at https://github.com/michaelneri/audio-distance-estimation.