Efficient Encoder-Decoder and Dual-Path Conformer for Comprehensive Feature Learning in Speech Enhancement

Abstract

Current speech enhancement (SE) research has largely neglected channel attention and spatial attention, and encoder-decoder architecture-based networks have not adequately considered how to provide efficient inputs to the intermediate enhancement layer. To address these issues, this paper proposes a time-frequency (T-F) domain SE network (DPCFCS-Net) that incorporates improved densely connected blocks, dual-path modules, convolution-augmented transformers (conformers), channel attention, and spatial attention. Compared with previous models, our proposed model has a more efficient encoder-decoder and can learn comprehensive features. Experimental results on the VCTK+DEMAND dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms existing techniques in SE performance. Furthermore, the improved densely connected block and two dimensions attention module developed in this work are highly adaptable and easily integrated into existing networks.