Two-level optimization approach with accelerated proximal gradient for objective measures in sparse speech reconstruction

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>Compressive speech enhancement makes use of the sparseness of speech and the non-sparseness of noise in time-frequency representation to perform speech enhancement. However, reconstructing the sparsest output may not necessarily translate to a good enhanced speech signal as speech distortion may be at risk. This paper proposes a two level optimization approach to incorporate objective quality measures in compressive speech enhancement. The proposed method combines the accelerated proximal gradient approach and a global one dimensional optimization method to solve the sparse reconstruction. By incorporating objective quality measures in the optimization process, the reconstructed output is not only sparse but also maintains the highest objective quality score possible. In other words, the sparse speech reconstruction process is now quality sparse speech reconstruction. Experimental results in a compressive speech enhancement consistently show score improvement in objectives measures in different noisy environments compared to the non-optimized method. Additionally, the proposed optimization yields a higher convergence rate with a lower computational complexity compared to the existing methods.</p>

Environmental Attention-Guided Branchy Neural Network for Speech Enhancement

The performance of speech enhancement algorithms can be further improved by considering the application scenarios of speech products. In this paper, we propose an attention-based branchy neural network framework by incorporating the prior environmental information for noise reduction. In the whole denoising framework, first, an environment classification network is trained to distinguish the noise type of each noisy speech frame. Guided by this classification network, the denoising network gradually learns respective noise reduction abilities in different branches. Unlike most deep neural network (DNN)-based methods, which learn speech reconstruction capabilities with a common neural structure from all training noises, the proposed branchy model obtains greater performance benefits from the specially trained branches of prior known noise interference types. Experimental results show that the proposed branchy DNN model not only preserved better enhanced speech quality and intelligibility in seen noisy environments, but also obtained good generalization in unseen noisy environments.