Target Speech Extraction with Conditional Diffusion Model

Diffusion model-based speech enhancement has received increased attention since it can generate very natural enhanced signals and generalizes well to unseen conditions. Diffusion models have been explored for several sub-tasks of speech enhancement, such as speech denoising, dereverberation, and source separation. In this paper, we investigate their use for target speech extraction (TSE), which consists of estimating the clean speech signal of a target speaker in a mixture of multi-talkers. TSE is realized by conditioning the extraction process on a clue identifying the target speaker. We show we can realize TSE using a conditional diffusion model conditioned on the clue. Besides, we introduce ensemble inference to reduce potential extraction errors caused by the diffusion process. In experiments on Libri2mix corpus, we show that the proposed diffusion model-based TSE combined with ensemble inference outperforms a comparable TSE system trained discriminatively.