Raw Waveform-based Speech Enhancement by Fully Convolutional Networks

Understand

This study proposes a fully convolutional network (FCN) model for raw waveform-based speech enhancement.

• The proposed system performs speech enhancement in an end-to-end (i.e., waveform-in and waveform-out) manner, which dif-fers from most existing denoising methods that process the magnitude spectrum (e.g., log power spectrum (LPS)) only.
• Because the fully connected layers, which are involved in deep neural networks (DNN) and convolutional neural networks (CNN), may not accurately characterize the local information of speech signals, particularly with high frequency components, we employed fully convolutional layers to model the waveform.
• More specifically, FCN consists of only convolutional layers and thus the local temporal structures of speech signals can be efficiently and effectively preserved with relatively few weights.