CompNet: Complementary network for single-channel speech enhancement

Abstract

Recent multi-domain processing methods have demonstrated promising performance for monaural speech enhancement tasks. However, few of them explain why they behave better over single-domain approaches. As an attempt to fill this gap, this paper presents a complementary single-channel speech enhancement network (CompNet) that demonstrates promising denoising capabilities and provides a unique perspective to understand the improvements introduced by multi-domain processing. Specifically, the noisy speech is initially enhanced through a time-domain network. However, despite the waveform can be feasibly recovered, the distribution of the time–frequency bins may still be partly different from the target spectrum when we reconsider the problem in the frequency domain. To solve this problem, we design a dedicated dual-path network as a post-processing module to independently filter the magnitude and refine the phase. This further drives the estimated spectrum to closely approximate the target spectrum in the time–frequency domain. We conduct extensive experiments with the WSJ0-SI84 and VoiceBank + Demand datasets. Objective test results show that the performance of the proposed system is highly competitive with existing systems.