SoundBeam: Target sound extraction conditioned on sound-class labels and enrollment clues for increased performance and continuous learning

In many situations, we would like to hear desired sound events (SEs) while being able to ignore interference. Target sound extraction (TSE) aims at tackling this problem by estimating the sound of target SE classes in a mixture while suppressing all other sounds. We can achieve this with a neural network that extracts the target SEs by conditioning it on clues representing the target SE classes. Two types of clues have been proposed, i.e., target SE class labels and enrollment sound samples similar to the target sound. Systems based on SE class labels can directly optimize embedding vectors representing the SE classes, resulting in high extraction performance. However, extending these systems to the extraction of new SE classes not encountered during training is not easy. Enrollment-based approaches extract SEs by finding sounds in the mixtures that share similar characteristics to the enrollment. These approaches do not explicitly rely on SE class definitions and can thus handle new SE classes. In this paper, we introduce a TSE framework, SoundBeam, that combines the advantages of both approaches. We also perform an extensive evaluation of the different TSE schemes using synthesized and real mixtures, which shows the potential of SoundBeam.