DNN-based enhancement of noisy and reverberant speech

Abstract

In the real world, speech is usually distorted by both reverberation and background noise. In such conditions, speech intelligibility is degraded substantially, especially for hearing-impaired (HI) listeners. As a consequence, it is essential to enhance speech in the noisy and reverberant environment. Recently, deep neural networks have been introduced to learn a spectral mapping to enhance corrupted speech, and shown significant improvements in objective metrics and automatic speech recognition score. However, listening tests have not yet shown any speech intelligibility benefit. In this paper, we propose to enhance the noisy and reverberant speech by learning a mapping to reverberant target speech rather than anechoic target speech. A preliminary listening test was conducted, and the results show that the proposed algorithm is able to improve speech intelligibility of HI listeners in some conditions. Moreover, we develop a masking-based method for denoising and compare it with the spectral mapping method. Evaluation results show that the masking-based method outperforms the mapping-based method.