Multi-CMGAN+/+: Leveraging Multi-Objective Speech Quality Metric Prediction for Speech Enhancement

Neural network based approaches to speech enhancement have shown to be particularly powerful, being able to leverage a data-driven approach to result in a significant performance gain versus other approaches. Such approaches are reliant on artificially created labelled training data such that the neural model can be trained using intrusive loss functions which compare the output of the model with clean reference speech. Performance of such systems when enhancing real-world audio often suffers relative to their performance on simulated test data. In this work, a non-intrusive multi-metric prediction approach is introduced, wherein a model trained on artificial labelled data using inference of an adversarially trained metric prediction neural network. The proposed approach shows improved performance versus state-of-the-art systems on the recent CHiME-7 challenge unsupervised domain adaptation speech enhancement (UDASE) task evaluation sets. Index Terms: speech enhancement, model generalisation, generative adversarial networks, conformer, metric prediction