Semi-supervised Multichannel Speech Enhancement with Variational Autoencoders and Non-negative Matrix Factorization

In this paper we address speaker-independent multichannel speech enhancement in unknown noisy environments. Our work is based on a well-established multichannel local Gaussian modeling framework. We propose to use a neural network for modeling the speech spectro-temporal content. The parameters of this supervised model are learned using the framework of variational autoencoders. The noisy recording environment is supposed to be unknown, so the noise spectro-temporal modeling remains unsupervised and is based on non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). We develop a Monte Carlo expectation-maximization algorithm and we experimentally show that the proposed approach outperforms its NMF-based counterpart, where speech is modeled using supervised NMF.