A systematic study of DNN based speech enhancement in reverberant and reverberant-noisy environments

Deep learning has led to dramatic performance improvements for the task of speech enhancement, where deep neural networks (DNNs) are trained to recover clean speech from noisy and reverberant mixtures. Most of the existing DNN-based algorithms operate in the frequency domain, as time-domain approaches are believed to be less effective for speech dereverberation. In this study, we employ two DNNs: ARN (attentive recurrent network) and DC-CRN (densely-connected convolutional recurrent network), and systematically investigate the effects of different components on enhancement performance, such as window sizes, loss functions, and feature representations. We conduct evaluation experiments in two main conditions: reverberant-only and reverberant-noisy. Our findings suggest that incorporating larger window sizes is helpful for dereverberation, and adding transform operations (either convolutional or linear) to encode and decode waveform features improves the sparsity of the learned representations, and boosts the performance of time-domain models. Experimental results demonstrate that ARN and DC-CRN with proposed techniques achieve superior performance compared with other strong enhancement baselines.