Speech enhancement

A method for enhancing audio signals, the method comprising:

• (a) obtaining, by a control system, a training set comprising a plurality of training samples, each training sample of the plurality of training samples comprising a distorted audio signal and a corresponding clean audio signal;
• (b) for a training sample of the plurality of training samples:
• obtaining, by the control system, a frequency-domain representation of the distorted audio signal,
• providing, by the control system, the frequency-domain representation of the distorted audio signal to a convolutional neural network (CNN) comprising a plurality of convolutional layers and providing, in parallel, the frequency domain representation to a recurrent element, wherein an output of the recurrent element is provided to a subset of the plurality of convolutional layers,
• generating, by the control system and using the CNN, a predicted enhancement mask, wherein the CNN generates the predicted enhancement mask based at least in part on the output of the recurrent element;
• generating, by the control system, a predicted enhanced audio signal based at least in part on the predicted enhancement mask, and
• updating, by the control system, weights associated with the CNN and the recurrent element based at least in part on the predicted enhanced audio signal and the corresponding clean audio signal;
• and
• (c) repeating (b) by the control system until a stopping criteria is reached, wherein the updated weights at a time the stopping criteria is reached correspond to a trained machine learning model for enhancing audio signals.