A novel BNMF-DNN based speech reconstruction method for speech quality evaluation under complex environments

Speech quality evaluation (SQE) under complex noisy environment is important for audio processing systems and quality of service. Recently, the non-intrusive SQE is getting more and more attentive due to its efficient and ease of use. However, non-intrusive SQEs are expected to be underperformed the intrusive ones since it has no prior knowledge of the clean speech. In this paper, a novel quasi-clean speech reconstruction method for non-intrusive SQE is proposed. The method incorporates Bayesian NMF (BNMF) with deep neural network (DNN), which takes the advantages of both NMF and DNN. BNMF is utilized to calculate the basic spectro-temporal matrixes of target speech, and the obtained matrices are integrated into the DNN model as an individual layer. Then DNN is trained to learn the complex mapping between the target source and the mixture signal, and reconstruct the magnitude spectrograms of the quasi-clean speech. Finally, the reconstructed speech is regarded as the reference of the perceptual model to estimate the Mean opinion score of the tested noisy sample. The experiment results show that the proposed method outperforms the comparative non-intrusive SQE algorithms under challenging conditions in terms of objective measurement.