Abstract

We investigate the effectiveness of generative adversarial networks (GANs) for speech enhancement, in the context of improving noise robustness of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Prior work [1] demonstrates that GANs can effectively suppress additive noise in raw waveform speech signals, improving perceptual quality metrics; however this technique was not justified in the context of ASR. In this work, we conduct a detailed study to measure the effectiveness of GANs in enhancing speech contaminated by both additive and reverberant noise. Motivated by recent advances in image processing [2], we propose operating GANs on log-Mel filterbank spectra instead of waveforms, which requires less computation and is more robust to reverberant noise. While GAN enhancement improves the performance of a clean-trained ASR system on noisy speech, it falls short of the performance achieved by conventional multi-style training (MTR). By appending the GAN-enhanced features to the noisy inputs and retraining, we achieve a $7$ % WER improvement relative to the MTR system.