Speech enhancement machine learning model for estimation of reverberation in a multi-task learning framework

Abstract

Techniques for training and using a machine learning model for estimation of reverberation in a multi-task learning framework are described. According to some embodiments, the multi-task learning framework improves the performance of the machine learning model by estimating the amount of reverberation present in an input audio recording as a secondary task to the primary task of generating a clean speech portion of the input audio recording. In one embodiment, a model architecture is selected that takes a noisy reverberant recording as an input and outputs an estimate of a clean (e.g., de-reverberated) signal, an estimate of noise (e.g., background noise), and an estimate of the reverb only portion, with the secondary task of estimating the reverb only portion acting as a regularizer that improves the machine learning model's performance in enhancing the reverberant (e.g., and noisy) input speech.