Voice Activity Detection Using an Adaptive Context Attention Model

Abstract

Voice activity detection (VAD) classifies incoming signal segments into speech or background noise; its performance is crucial in various speech-related applications. Although speech-signal context is a relevant VAD asset, its usefulness varies in unpredictable noise environments. Therefore, its usage should be adaptively adjustable to the noise type. This letter improves the use of context information by using an adaptive context attention model (ACAM) with a novel training strategy for effective attention, which weights the most crucial parts of the context for proper classification. Experiments in real-world scenarios demonstrate that the proposed ACAM-based VAD outperforms the other baseline VAD methods.