Voice-ENHANCE: Speech Restoration using a Diffusion-based Voice Conversion Framework

Abstract: We propose a speech enhancement system that combines speaker-agnostic speech restoration with voice conversion (VC) to obtain a studio-level quality speech signal. While voice conversion models are typically used to change speaker characteristics, they can also serve as a means of speech restoration when the target speaker is the same as the source speaker. However, since VC models are vulnerable to noisy conditions, we have included a generative speech restoration (GSR) model at the front end of our proposed system. The GSR model performs noise suppression and restores speech damage incurred during that process without knowledge about the target speaker. The VC stage then uses guidance from clean speaker embeddings to further restore the output speech. By employing this two-stage approach, we have achieved speech quality objective metric scores comparable to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods across multiple datasets.