Cross Domain Optimization for Speech Enhancement: Parallel or Cascade?

This paper introduces five novel deep-learning architectures for speech enhancement. Existing methods typically use time-domain, time-frequency representations, or a hybrid approach. Recognizing the unique contributions of each domain to feature extraction and model design, this study investigates the integration of waveform and complex spectrogram models through cross-domain fusion to enhance speech feature learning and noise reduction, thereby improving speech quality. We examine both cascading and parallel configurations of waveform and complex spectrogram models to assess their effectiveness in speech enhancement. Additionally, we employ an orthogonal projection-based error decomposition technique and manage the inputs of individual sub-models to analyze factors affecting speech quality. The network is trained by optimizing three specific loss functions applied across all sub-models. Our experiments, using the DNS Challenge (ICASSP 2021) dataset, reveal that the proposed models surpass existing benchmarks in speech enhancement, offering superior speech quality and intelligibility. These results highlight the efficacy of our cross-domain fusion strategy.