Multi-channel Speech Enhancement with 2-D Convolutional Time-frequency Domain Features and a Pre-trained Acoustic Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel multi-channel speech enhancement method that combines time-frequency features with a pre-trained acoustic model, achieving significant improvements in speech quality metrics.

Contribution

It presents a new two-stage feature fusion approach and integrates a pre-trained acoustic model within a multi-task learning framework for enhanced speech quality.

Findings

PESQ improved by 0.24 over baseline

Effective multi-channel feature fusion demonstrated

Pre-trained acoustic model constrains distortion

Abstract

We propose a multi-channel speech enhancement approach with a novel two-stage feature fusion method and a pre-trained acoustic model in a multi-task learning paradigm. In the first fusion stage, the time-domain and frequency-domain features are extracted separately. In the time domain, the multi-channel convolution sum (MCS) and the inter-channel convolution differences (ICDs) features are computed and then integrated with the first 2-D convolutional layer, while in the frequency domain, the log-power spectra (LPS) features from both original channels and super-directive beamforming outputs are combined with a second 2-D convolutional layer. To fully integrate the rich information of multi-channel speech, i.e. time-frequency domain features and the array geometry, we apply a third 2-D convolutional layer in the second fusion stage to obtain the final convolutional features. Furthermore, we propose to use a fixed clean acoustic model trained with the end-to-end lattice-free maximum mutual information criterion to enforce the enhanced output to have the same distribution as the clean waveform to alleviate the over-estimation problem of the enhancement task and constrain distortion. On the Task1 development dataset of ConferencingSpeech 2021 challenge, a PESQ improvement of 0.24 and 0.19 is attained compared to the official baseline and a recently proposed multi-channel separation method.