CNN self-attention voice activity detector

Abstract: In this work we present a novel single-channel Voice Activity Detector (VAD) approach. We utilize a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) which exploits the spatial information of the noisy input spectrum to extract frame-wise embedding sequence, followed by a Self Attention (SA) Encoder with a goal of finding contextual information from the embedding sequence. Different from previous works which were employed on each frame (with context frames) separately, our method is capable of processing the entire signal at once, and thus enabling long receptive field. We show that the fusion of CNN and SA architectures outperforms methods based solely on CNN and SA. Extensive experimental-study shows that our model outperforms previous models on real-life benchmarks, and provides State Of The Art (SOTA) results with relatively small and lightweight model.