Multi-task joint-learning for robust voice activity detection

Model based VAD approaches have been widely used and achieved success in practice. These approaches usually cast VAD as a frame-level classification problem and employ statistical classifiers, such as Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) or Deep Neural Network (DNN) to assign a speech/silence label for each frame. Due to the frame independent assumption classification, the VAD results tend to be fragile. To address this problem, in this paper, a new structured multi-frame prediction DNN approach is proposed to improve the segment-level VAD performance. During DNN training, VAD labels of multiple consecutive frames are concatenated together as targets and jointly trained with a speech enhancement task to achieve robustness under noisy conditions. During testing, the VAD label for each frame is obtained by merging the prediction results from neighbouring frames. Experiments on an Aurora 4 dataset showed that, conventional DNN based VAD has poor and unstable prediction performance while the proposed multitask trained VAD is much more robust.