Missing component restoration for masked speech signals based on time-domain spectrogram factorization

Abstract

While time-frequency masking is a powerful approach for speech enhancement in terms of signal recovery accuracy (e.g., signal-to-noise ratio), it can over-suppress and damage speech components, leading to limited performance of succeeding speech processing systems. To overcome this shortcoming, this paper proposes a method to restore missing components of time-frequency masked speech spectrograms based on direct estimation of a time domain signal. The proposed method allows us to take account of the local interdepen-dencies of the elements of the complex spectrogram derived from the redundancy of a time-frequency representation as well as the global structure of the magnitude spectrogram. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through experimental evaluation, using spectrograms filtered with masks to enhance of noisy speech. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperformed conventional methods, and has the potential to estimate both phase and magnitude spectra simultaneously and precisely.