Leveraging Self-Supervised Audio-Visual Pretrained Models to Improve Vocoded Speech Intelligibility in Cochlear Implant Simulation

Individuals with hearing impairments face challenges in their ability to comprehend speech, particularly in noisy environments. The aim of this study is to explore the effectiveness of audio-visual speech enhancement (AVSE) in enhancing the intelligibility of vocoded speech in cochlear implant (CI) simulations. Notably, the study focuses on a challenged scenario where there is limited availability of training data for the AVSE task. To address this problem, we propose a novel deep neural network framework termed Self-Supervised Learning-based AVSE (SSL-AVSE). The proposed SSL-AVSE combines visual cues, such as lip and mouth movements, from the target speakers with corresponding audio signals. The contextually combined audio and visual data are then fed into a Transformer-based SSL AV-HuBERT model to extract features, which are further processed using a BLSTM-based SE model. The results demonstrate several key findings. Firstly, SSL-AVSE successfully overcomes the issue of limited data by leveraging the AV-HuBERT model. Secondly, by fine-tuning the AV-HuBERT model parameters for the target SE task, significant performance improvements are achieved. Specifically, there is a notable enhancement in PESQ (Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality) from 1.43 to 1.67 and in STOI (Short-Time Objective Intelligibility) from 0.70 to 0.74. Furthermore, the performance of the SSL-AVSE was evaluated using CI vocoded speech to assess the intelligibility for CI users. Comparative experimental outcomes reveal that in the presence of dynamic noises encountered during human conversations, SSL-AVSE exhibits a substantial improvement. The NCM (Normal Correlation Matrix) values indicate an increase of 26.5% to 87.2% compared to the noisy baseline.