Improving Perceptual Quality, Intelligibility, and Acoustics on VoIP Platforms

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-task learning approach to fine-tune DNS 2020 models for VoIP, enhancing speech quality and intelligibility by adapting to VoIP-specific distortions and artifacts.

Contribution

It presents a novel multi-task framework for adapting DNS models specifically to VoIP acoustics, improving speech enhancement performance in VoIP scenarios.

Findings

Outperforms industry and state-of-the-art speech enhancement methods for VoIP.

Effectively adapts DNS models to VoIP-specific distortions.

Demonstrates improvements across diverse VoIP scenarios.

Abstract

In this paper, we present a method for fine-tuning models trained on the Deep Noise Suppression (DNS) 2020 Challenge to improve their performance on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications. Our approach involves adapting the DNS 2020 models to the specific acoustic characteristics of VoIP communications, which includes distortion and artifacts caused by compression, transmission, and platform-specific processing. To this end, we propose a multi-task learning framework for VoIP-DNS that jointly optimizes noise suppression and VoIP-specific acoustics for speech enhancement. We evaluate our approach on a diverse VoIP scenarios and show that it outperforms both industry performance and state-of-the-art methods for speech enhancement on VoIP applications. Our results demonstrate the potential of models trained on DNS-2020 to be improved and tailored to different VoIP platforms using VoIP-DNS, whose findings have important applications in areas such as speech recognition, voice assistants, and telecommunication.