Employing Real Training Data for Deep Noise Suppression

Most deep noise suppression (DNS) models are trained with reference-based losses requiring access to clean speech. However, sometimes an additive microphone model is insufficient for real-world applications. Accordingly, ways to use real training data in supervised learning for DNS models promise to reduce a potential training/inference mismatch. Employing real data for DNS training requires either generative approaches or a reference-free loss without access to the corresponding clean speech. In this work, we propose to employ an end-to-end non-intrusive deep neural network (DNN), named PESQ-DNN, to estimate perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) scores of enhanced real data. It provides a reference-free perceptual loss for employing real data during DNS training, maximizing the PESQ scores. Furthermore, we use an epoch-wise alternating training protocol, updating the DNS model on real data, followed by PESQ-DNN updating on synthetic data. The DNS model trained with the PESQ-DNN employing real data outperforms all reference methods employing only synthetic training data. On synthetic test data, our proposed method excels the Interspeech 2021 DNS Challenge baseline by a significant 0.32 PESQ points. Both on synthetic and real test data, the proposed method beats the baseline by 0.05 DNSMOS points - although PESQ-DNN optimizes for a different perceptual metric.

EffCRN: An Efficient Convolutional Recurrent Network for High-Performance Speech Enhancement

Fully convolutional recurrent neural networks (FCRNs) have shown state-of-the-art performance in single-channel speech enhancement. However, the number of parameters and the FLOPs/second of the original FCRN are restrictively high. A further important class of efficient networks is the CRUSE topology, serving as reference in our work. By applying a number of topological changes at once, we propose both an efficient FCRN (FCRN15), and a new family of efficient convolutional recurrent neural networks (EffCRN23, EffCRN23lite). We show that our FCRN15 (875K parameters) and EffCRN23lite (396K) outperform the already efficient CRUSE5 (85M) and CRUSE4 (7.2M) networks, respectively, w.r.t. PESQ, DNSMOS and DeltaSNR, while requiring about 94% less parameters and about 20% less #FLOPs/frame. Thereby, according to these metrics, the FCRN/EffCRN class of networks provides new best-in-class network topologies for speech enhancement.