PLDNet: PLD-Guided Lightweight Deep Network Boosted by Efficient Attention for Handheld Dual-Microphone Speech Enhancement

Abstract: Low-complexity speech enhancement on mobile phones is crucial in the era of 5G. Thus, focusing on handheld mobile phone communication scenario, based on power level difference (PLD) algorithm and lightweight U-Net, we propose PLD-guided lightweight deep network (PLDNet), an extremely lightweight dual-microphone speech enhancement method that integrates the guidance of signal processing algorithm and lightweight attention-augmented U-Net. For the guidance information, we employ PLD algorithm to pre-process dual-microphone spectrum, and feed the output into subsequent deep neural network, which utilizes a lightweight U-Net with our proposed gated convolution augmented frequency attention (GCAFA) module to extract desired clean speech. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves competitive performance with recent top-performing models while reducing computational cost by over 90%, highlighting the potential for low-complexity speech enhancement on mobile phones.