A Hybrid Classical-Learning Framework for Adaptive Decision Directed Speech Enhancement

Abstract

Speech enhancement aims to recover clean speech signals from noisy observations while preserving speech quality and intelligibility. Classical methods such as Spectral Subtraction and Decision-Directed (DD) enhancement remain widely used because of their interpretability and low computational complexity, but they may suffer from musical-noise artifacts or excessive attenuation of weak speech components under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions. This paper proposes an Adaptive Beta-Constrained Decision-Directed (ABCDD) speech enhancement framework that extends the conventional DD method through a frame-dependent lower gain bound. The introduced beta parameter controls the tradeoff between noise suppression and speech preservation. To automate parameter selection for large and diverse datasets, a lightweight multilayer perceptron (MLP) model is further developed to predict frame-level beta values directly from noisy-speech features. The proposed framework is evaluated using both a representative speech example and large-scale testing on the VoiceBank-DEMAND dataset. In the representative example, ABCDD outperformed conventional Spectral Subtraction and classical DD across multiple objective metrics, including SNR, Log-Spectral Distance (LSD), Root-Mean-Square Error (RMSE), correlation, and Scale-Invariant Signal-to-Distortion Ratio (SI-SDR). On 100 unseen VoiceBank-DEMAND test files, the proposed MLP-beta ABCDD method improved average scale-aligned SNR from 9.41 dB to 13.82 dB, corresponding to an average gain of 4.41 dB. The results indicate that combining interpretable classical enhancement structure with lightweight machine-learning-based parameter adaptation provides an effective and practical direction for robust speech enhancement.