DFingerNet: Noise-Adaptive Speech Enhancement for Hearing Aids
This addresses the need for better noise adaptation in hearing aid devices, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods.
The paper tackled the problem of noise-adaptive speech enhancement for hearing aids by introducing DFingerNet, which improves upon DeepFilterNet with in-context adaptation, achieving superior performance on benchmarks inspired by the DNS Challenge.
The DeepFilterNet (DFN) architecture was recently proposed as a deep learning model suited for hearing aid devices. Despite its competitive performance on numerous benchmarks, it still follows a `one-size-fits-all' approach, which aims to train a single, monolithic architecture that generalises across different noises and environments. However, its limited size and computation budget can hamper its generalisability. Recent work has shown that in-context adaptation can improve performance by conditioning the denoising process on additional information extracted from background recordings to mitigate this. These recordings can be offloaded outside the hearing aid, thus improving performance while adding minimal computational overhead. We introduce these principles to the DFN model, thus proposing the DFingerNet (DFiN) model, which shows superior performance on various benchmarks inspired by the DNS Challenge.