Towards Model Compression for Deep Learning Based Speech Enhancement

The use of deep neural networks (DNNs) has dramatically elevated the performance of speech enhancement over the last decade. However, to achieve strong enhancement performance typically requires a large DNN, which is both memory and computation consuming, making it difficult to deploy such speech enhancement systems on devices with limited hardware resources or in applications with strict latency requirements. In this study, we propose two compression pipelines to reduce the model size for DNN-based speech enhancement, which incorporates three different techniques: sparse regularization, iterative pruning and clustering-based quantization. We systematically investigate these techniques and evaluate the proposed compression pipelines. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach reduces the sizes of four different models by large margins without significantly sacrificing their enhancement performance. In addition, we find that the proposed approach performs well on speaker separation, which further demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach for compressing speech separation models.