A Comparative Evaluation of Deep Learning Models for Speech Enhancement in Real-World Noisy Environments
It addresses the problem of optimizing trade-offs in speech enhancement for applications like voice biometrics and telecommunications, but it is incremental as it compares existing models without introducing new methods.
This study benchmarks three deep learning models for speech enhancement in noisy environments, finding that U-Net excels in noise suppression with SNR improvements up to +364.2%, CMGAN leads in perceptual quality with PESQ scores up to 4.04, and Wave-U-Net balances attributes with VeriSpeak score gains up to +27.38%.
Speech enhancement, particularly denoising, is vital in improving the intelligibility and quality of speech signals for real-world applications, especially in noisy environments. While prior research has introduced various deep learning models for this purpose, many struggle to balance noise suppression, perceptual quality, and speaker-specific feature preservation, leaving a critical research gap in their comparative performance evaluation. This study benchmarks three state-of-the-art models Wave-U-Net, CMGAN, and U-Net, on diverse datasets such as SpEAR, VPQAD, and Clarkson datasets. These models were chosen due to their relevance in the literature and code accessibility. The evaluation reveals that U-Net achieves high noise suppression with SNR improvements of +71.96% on SpEAR, +64.83% on VPQAD, and +364.2% on the Clarkson dataset. CMGAN outperforms in perceptual quality, attaining the highest PESQ scores of 4.04 on SpEAR and 1.46 on VPQAD, making it well-suited for applications prioritizing natural and intelligible speech. Wave-U-Net balances these attributes with improvements in speaker-specific feature retention, evidenced by VeriSpeak score gains of +10.84% on SpEAR and +27.38% on VPQAD. This research indicates how advanced methods can optimize trade-offs between noise suppression, perceptual quality, and speaker recognition. The findings may contribute to advancing voice biometrics, forensic audio analysis, telecommunication, and speaker verification in challenging acoustic conditions.