Improving multichannel speech enhancement through accurate room-acoustic simulations

2026-06-30

AI Summary

This study addresses the performance limitations of multichannel speech enhancement models in real-world scenarios caused by low-fidelity room acoustic simulations. To bridge this gap, the work presents the first systematic validation demonstrating that high-fidelity acoustic simulation substantially improves speech enhancement performance. The authors propose a hybrid room impulse response simulation method that integrates wave-based and geometric acoustic modeling, and train and evaluate models using the SpatialNet architecture. Experimental results show that models trained on high-fidelity simulated data achieve up to a 38% reduction in median word error rate compared to those trained with conventional low-fidelity simulations, significantly enhancing robustness and generalization in real measured environments.

Abstract

Room-acoustic simulations are widely used to augment training data for deep-learning-based speech enhancement. While most pipelines rely on simplified geometrical acoustics, wave-based approaches offer greater physical accuracy. In this work, we examine how simulation fidelity affects multichannel speech enhancement performance. To this end, we train SpatialNet on datasets augmented with different room-acoustic simulation methods and evaluate the resulting models on measured data. We compare lower-fidelity datasets based on geometrical acoustics with a high-fidelity dataset using advanced acoustic modelling and a hybrid combination of wave-based and geometrical acoustics simulations. Training on the high-fidelity dataset results in an up to 38 % relative reduction in median word error rate compared to the lower-fidelity alternatives. These results show that augmentation with high-fidelity room-acoustic simulations directly translates into improved multichannel speech enhancement performance.

Problem

• multichannel speech enhancement
• room-acoustic simulations
• simulation fidelity
• speech enhancement performance

Innovation

• room-acoustic simulation
• multichannel speech enhancement
• wave-based acoustics
• data augmentation
• SpatialNet