Wavesplit: End-to-End Speech Separation by Speaker Clustering

We introduce Wavesplit, an end-to-end speech separation system. From a single recording of mixed speech, the model infers and clusters representations of each speaker and then estimates each source signal conditioned on the inferred representations. The model is trained on the raw waveform to jointly perform the two tasks. Our model infers a set of speaker representations through clustering, which addresses the fundamental permutation problem of speech separation. Moreover, the sequence-wide speaker representations provide a more robust separation of long, challenging sequences, compared to previous approaches. We show that Wavesplit outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on clean mixtures of 2 or 3 speakers (WSJ0-2mix, WSJ0-3mix), as well as in noisy (WHAM!) and reverberated (WHAMR!) conditions. As an additional contribution, we further improve our model by introducing online data augmentation for separation.