Non-Intrusive Binaural Speech Intelligibility Prediction From Discrete Latent Representations

Non-intrusive speech intelligibility (SI) prediction from binaural signals is useful in many applications. However, most existing signal-based measures are designed to be applied to single-channel signals. Measures specifically designed to take into account the binaural properties of the signal are often intrusive – characterised by requiring access to a clean speech signal – and typically rely on combining both channels into a single-channel signal before making predictions. This letter proposes a non-intrusive SI measure that computes features from a binaural input signal using a combination of vector quantization (VQ) and contrastive predictive coding (CPC) methods. vector quantized contrastive predictive coding (VQ-CPC) feature extraction does not rely on any model of the auditory system and is instead trained to maximise the mutual information between the input signal and output features. The computed VQ-CPC features are input to a predicting function parameterized by a neural network. Two predicting functions are considered in this letter. Both feature extractor and predicting functions are trained on simulated binaural signals with isotropic noise. They are tested on simulated signals with isotropic and real noise. For all signals, the ground truth scores are the (intrusive) deterministic binaural short-time objective intelligibility (STOI). Results are presented in terms of correlations and mean-squared error (MSE) and demonstrate that VQ-CPC features are able to capture information relevant to modelling SI and outperform all the considered benchmarks – even when evaluating on data comprising of different noise field types.