Controlling the Parameterized Multi-channel Wiener Filter using a tiny neural network

Abstract: Noise suppression and speech distortion are two important aspects to be balanced when designing multi-channel Speech Enhancement (SE) algorithms. Although neural network models have achieved state-of-the-art noise suppression, their non-linear operations often introduce high speech distortion. Conversely, classical signal processing algorithms such as the Parameterized Multi-channel Wiener Filter ( PMWF) beamformer offer explicit mechanisms for controlling the suppression/distortion trade-off. In this work, we present NeuralPMWF, a system where the PMWF is entirely controlled using a low-latency, low-compute neural network, resulting in a low-complexity system offering high noise reduction and low speech distortion. Experimental results show that our proposed approach results in significantly better perceptual and objective speech enhancement in comparison to several competitive baselines using similar computational resources.