Suppression of Background Noise in Speech Signals with Artificial Neural Networks, Exemplarily Applied to Keyboard Sounds

Abstract

The importance of remote voice communication has greatly increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. With that comes the problem of degraded speech quality because of background noise. While there can be many unwanted background sounds, this work focuses on dynamically suppressing keyboard sounds in speech signals by utilizing artificial neural networks. Based on the Mel spectrograms as inputs, the neural networks are trained to predict how much power of a frequency inside a time window has to be removed to suppress the keyboard sound. For that goal, we have generated audio signals combined from samples of two publicly available datasets with speaker and keyboard noise recordings. Additionally, we compare three network architectures with different parameter settings as well as an open-source tool RNNoise. The results from the experiments described in this paper show that artificial neural networks can be successfully applied to remove complex background noise from speech signals. Copyright © 2022 by SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, Lda.