Vector Quantization of Speech Spectrum Based on the VQ-VAE Embedding Space Learning by GAN Technique

Abstract

The spectral envelope parameter is a significant speech parameter in the vocoder's quality. Recently, the Vector Quantized Variational AutoEncoder (VQ-VAE) is a state-of-the-art end-to-end quantization method based on the deep learning model. This paper proposed a new technique for improving the embedding space learning of VQ-VAE with the Generative Adversarial Network for quantizing the spectral envelope parameter, called VQ-VAE-EMGAN. In experiments, we designed the quantizer for the spectral envelope parameters of the WORLD vocoder extracted from the 16kHz speech waveform. As the results shown, the proposed technique reduced the Log Spectral Distortion (LSD) around 0.5dB and increased the PESQ by around 0.17 on average for four target bit operations compared to the conventional VQ-VAE.