A Causal Speech Enhancement Approach Combining Data-driven Learning and Suppression Rule Estimation

The problem of single-channel speech enhancement has been traditionally addressed by using statistical signal processing algorithms that are designed to suppress time-frequency regions affected by noise. We study an alternative data-driven approach which uses deep neural networks (DNNs) to learn the transformation from noisy and reverberant speech to clean speech, with a focus on real-time applications which require low-latency causal processing. We examine several structures in which deep learning can be used within an enhancement system. These include end-to-end DNN regression from noisy to clean spectra, as well as less intervening approaches which estimate a suppression gain for each time-frequency bin instead of directly recovering the clean spectral features. We also propose a novel architecture in which the general structure of a conventional noise suppressor is preserved, but the sub-tasks are independently learned and carried out by separate networks. It is shown that DNN-based suppression gain estimation outperforms the regression approach in the causal processing mode and for noise types that are not seen during DNN training.