Speech-dependent Data Augmentation for Own Voice Reconstruction with Hearable Microphones in Noisy Environments

Abstract: Own voice pickup for hearables in noisy environments benefits from using both an outer and an in-ear microphone outside and inside the occluded ear. Due to environmental noise recorded at both microphones, and amplification of the own voice at low frequencies and band-limitation at the in-ear microphone, an own voice reconstruction system is needed to enable communication. A large amount of own voice signals is required to train a supervised deep learning-based own voice reconstruction system. Training data can either be obtained by recording a large amount of own voice signals of different talkers with a specific device, which is costly, or through augmentation of available speech data. Own voice signals can be simulated by assuming a linear time-invariant relative transfer function between hearable microphones for each phoneme, referred to as own voice transfer characteristics. In this paper, we propose data augmentation techniques for training an own voice reconstruction system based on speech-dependent models of own voice transfer characteristics between hearable microphones. The proposed techniques use few recorded own voice signals to estimate transfer characteristics and can then be used to simulate a large amount of own voice signals based on single-channel speech signals. Experimental results show that the proposed speech-dependent individual data augmentation technique leads to better performance compared to other data augmentation techniques or compared to training only on the available recorded own voice signals, and additional fine-tuning on the available recorded signals can improve performance further.