A Two-Stage Framework in Cross-Spectrum Domain for Real-Time Speech Enhancement

Two-stage pipeline is popular in speech enhancement tasks due to its superiority over traditional single-stage methods. The current two-stage approaches usually enhance the magnitude spectrum in the first stage, and further modify the complex spectrum to suppress the residual noise and recover the speech phase in the second stage. The above whole process is performed in the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) spectrum domain. In this paper, we re-implement the above second sub-process in the short-time discrete cosine transform (STDCT) spectrum domain. The reason is that we have found STDCT performs greater noise suppression capability than STFT. Additionally, the implicit phase of STDCT ensures simpler and more efficient phase recovery, which is challenging and computationally expensive in the STFT-based methods. Therefore, we propose a novel two-stage framework called the STFT-STDCT spectrum fusion network (FDFNet) for speech enhancement in cross-spectrum domain. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed FDFNet outperforms the previous two-stage methods and also exhibits superior performance compared to other advanced systems.