FNSE-SBGAN: Far-field Speech Enhancement with Schrodinger Bridge and Generative Adversarial Networks

Abstract: The prevailing method for neural speech enhancement predominantly utilizes fully-supervised deep learning with simulated pairs of far-field noisy-reverberant speech and clean speech. Nonetheless, these models frequently demonstrate restricted generalizability to mixtures recorded in real-world conditions. To address this issue, this study investigates training enhancement models directly on real mixtures. Specifically, we revisit the single-channel far-field to near-field speech enhancement (FNSE) task, focusing on real-world data characterized by low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), high reverberation, and mid-to-high frequency attenuation. We propose FNSE-SBGAN, a framework that integrates a Schrodinger Bridge (SB)-based diffusion model with generative adversarial networks (GANs). Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across various metrics and subjective evaluations, significantly reducing the character error rate (CER) by up to 14.58% compared to far-field signals. Experimental results demonstrate that FNSE-SBGAN preserves superior subjective quality and establishes a new benchmark for real-world far-field speech enhancement. Additionally, we introduce an evaluation framework leveraging matrix rank analysis in the time-frequency domain, providing systematic insights into model performance and revealing the strengths and weaknesses of different generative methods.