Environmental attention-guided branchy neural network for speech enhancement

The performance of speech enhancement algorithms can be further improved by considering the application scenarios of speech products. In this paper, we propose an attention-based branchy neural network framework by incorporating the prior environmental information for noise reduction. In the whole denoising framework, first, an environment classification network is trained to distinguish the noise type of each noisy speech frame. Guided by this classification network, the denoising network gradually learns respective noise reduction abilities in different branches. Unlike most deep neural network (DNN)-based methods, which learn speech reconstruction capabilities with a common neural structure from all training noises, the proposed branchy model obtains greater performance benefits from the specially trained branches of prior known noise interference types. Experimental results show that the proposed branchy DNN model not only preserved better enhanced speech quality and intelligibility in seen noisy environments, but also obtained good generalization in unseen noisy environments.