Improving Reverberant Speech Separation with Synthetic Room Impulse Responses

We present a novel approach that improves the performance of reverberant speech separation. Our approach is based on an accurate geometric acoustic simulator (GAS) which generates realistic room impulse responses (RIRs) by modeling both specular and diffuse reflections. We also propose two training methods - pre-training and curriculum learning that significantly improve separation quality in the presence of reverberation. We also demonstrate that mixing the synthetic RIRs with a small number of real RIRs during training enhances separation performance. We eval-uate our approach on reverberant mixtures generated from real, recorded data (in several different room configurations) from the VOiCES dataset. Our novel approach (curriculum learning+pre-training+GAS) results in relative improvement of 123% in SI-SDRi over prior techniques based on image source method (ISM).