Room Impulse Response Embeddings for Speech Enhancement in Noisy and Reverberant Environments

Abstract: We propose a self-supervised approach for learning room impulse response (RIR) representations from single-channel noisy-reverberant speech. It consists of first training on reverberant data, then on noisy-reverberant data, and finally with a teacher-student approach, where the student learns to replicate the teacher's embeddings when given a noisy version of the reverberant input. We assess their representational capabilities by estimating acoustic room parameters from them. Conditioning a discriminative speech enhancement model on the derived embeddings yields consistent gains across all evaluated metrics, including downstream word error rate, for both reverberant and noisy-reverberant speech.