A Feature Integration Network for Multi-Channel Speech Enhancement

Abstract

Multi-channel speech enhancement has become an active area of research, demonstrating excellent performance in recovering desired speech signals from noisy environments. Recent approaches have increasingly focused on leveraging spectral information from multi-channel inputs, yielding promising results. In this study, we propose a novel feature integration network that not only captures spectral information but also refines it through shifted-window-based self-attention, enhancing the quality and precision of the feature extraction. Our network consists of blocks containing a full- and sub-band LSTM module for capturing spectral information, and a global–local attention fusion module for refining this information. The full- and sub-band LSTM module integrates both full-band and sub-band information through two LSTM layers, while the global–local attention fusion module learns global and local attention in a dual-branch architecture. To further enhance the feature integration, we fuse the outputs of these branches using a spatial attention module. The model is trained to predict the complex ratio mask (CRM), thereby improving the quality of the enhanced signal. We conducted an ablation study to assess the contribution of each module, with each showing a significant impact on performance. Additionally, our model was trained on the SPA-DNS dataset using a circular microphone array and the Libri-wham dataset with a linear microphone array, achieving competitive results compared to state-of-the-art models.