On phase recovery and preserving early reflections for deep-learning speech dereverberation

In indoor environments, reverberation often distorts clean speech. Although deep learning-based speech dereverberation approaches have shown much better performance than traditional ones, the inferior speech quality of the dereverberated speech caused by magnitude distortion and limited phase recovery is still a serious problem for practical applications. This paper improves the performance of deep learning-based speech dereverberation from the perspectives of both network design and mapping target optimization. Specifically, on the one hand, a bifurcated-and-fusion network and its guidance loss functions were designed to help reduce the magnitude distortion while enhancing the phase recovery. On the other hand, the time boundary between the early and late reflections in the mapped speech was investigated, so as to make a balance between the reverberation tailing effect and the difficulty of magnitude/phase recovery. Mathematical derivations were provided to show the rationality of the specially designed loss functions. Geometric illustrations were given to explain the importance of preserving early reflections in reducing the difficulty of phase recovery. Ablation study results confirmed the validity of the proposed network topology and the importance of preserving 20 ms early reflections in the mapped speech. Objective and subjective test results showed that the proposed system outperformed other baselines in the speech dereverberation task.