Influence of Clean Speech Characteristics on Speech Enhancement Performance

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Hou, Mingchi, Kodrasi, Ina
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Hou, Mingchi
Kodrasi, Ina
author_facet Hou, Mingchi
Kodrasi, Ina
contents Speech enhancement (SE) performance is known to depend on noise characteristics and signal to noise ratio (SNR), yet intrinsic properties of the clean speech signal itself remain an underexplored factor. In this work, we systematically analyze how clean speech characteristics influence enhancement difficulty across multiple state of the art SE models, languages, and noise conditions. We extract a set of pitch, formant, loudness, and spectral flux features from clean speech and compute correlations with objective SE metrics, including frequency weighted segmental SNR and PESQ. Our results show that formant amplitudes are consistently predictive of SE performance, with higher and more stable formants leading to larger enhancement gains. We further demonstrate that performance varies substantially even within a single speaker's utterances, highlighting the importance of intraspeaker acoustic variability. These findings provide new insights into SE challenges, suggesting that intrinsic speech characteristics should be considered when designing datasets, evaluation protocols, and enhancement models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_18885
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Influence of Clean Speech Characteristics on Speech Enhancement Performance
Hou, Mingchi
Kodrasi, Ina
Audio and Speech Processing
Speech enhancement (SE) performance is known to depend on noise characteristics and signal to noise ratio (SNR), yet intrinsic properties of the clean speech signal itself remain an underexplored factor. In this work, we systematically analyze how clean speech characteristics influence enhancement difficulty across multiple state of the art SE models, languages, and noise conditions. We extract a set of pitch, formant, loudness, and spectral flux features from clean speech and compute correlations with objective SE metrics, including frequency weighted segmental SNR and PESQ. Our results show that formant amplitudes are consistently predictive of SE performance, with higher and more stable formants leading to larger enhancement gains. We further demonstrate that performance varies substantially even within a single speaker's utterances, highlighting the importance of intraspeaker acoustic variability. These findings provide new insights into SE challenges, suggesting that intrinsic speech characteristics should be considered when designing datasets, evaluation protocols, and enhancement models.
title Influence of Clean Speech Characteristics on Speech Enhancement Performance
topic Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18885