A Mask Free Neural Network for Monaural Speech Enhancement
This addresses speech enhancement in noisy environments, offering a novel approach that improves performance for applications like communication systems, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing architectures.
The paper tackles speech enhancement by proposing MFNet, a direct and simple neural network that maps speech and reverse noise, outperforming masking methods and achieving state-of-the-art results on the 2020 DNS challenge test set.
In speech enhancement, the lack of clear structural characteristics in the target speech phase requires the use of conservative and cumbersome network frameworks. It seems difficult to achieve competitive performance using direct methods and simple network architectures. However, we propose the MFNet, a direct and simple network that can not only map speech but also map reverse noise. This network is constructed by stacking global local former blocks (GLFBs), which combine the advantages of Mobileblock for global processing and Metaformer architecture for local interaction. Our experimental results demonstrate that our network using mapping method outperforms masking methods, and direct mapping of reverse noise is the optimal solution in strong noise environments. In a horizontal comparison on the 2020 Deep Noise Suppression (DNS) challenge test set without reverberation, to the best of our knowledge, MFNet is the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) mapping model.