Dual-Stage Low-Complexity Reconfigurable Speech Enhancement

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dual-stage, low-complexity reconfigurable speech enhancement method that significantly improves speech quality and noise suppression in telecommunication applications by performing coarse and fine processing stages.

Contribution

The proposed approach is novel in its dual-stage design driven by input data, offering reconfigurability and improved speech quality metrics over traditional methods.

Findings

Significantly improves 3QUEST metrics (SMOS and NMOS)

Enhances SNR and subjective listening experience

Can be integrated into various speech communication systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a dual-stage, low complexity, and reconfigurable technique to enhance the speech contaminated by various types of noise sources. Driven by input data and audio contents, the proposed dual-stage speech enhancement approach performs a coarse and fine processing in the first-stage and second-stage, respectively. In this paper, we demonstrate that the proposed speech enhancement solution significantly enhances the metrics of 3-fold QUality Evaluation of Speech in Telecommunication (3QUEST) consisting of speech mean-opinion-score (SMOS) and noise MOS (NMOS) for near-field and far-field applications. Moreover, the proposed speech enhancement approach greatly improves both the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and subjective listening experience. For comparisons, the traditional speech enhancement methods reduce the SMOS although they increase NMOS and SNR. In addition, the proposed speech enhancement scheme can be easily adopted in both capture path and speech render path for speech communication and conferencing systems, and voice-trigger applications.