Speech enhancement method integrating squeeze and excitation channel attention mechanism and improved CGAN

Yecai Guo, Meiyu Liang and Tianyue Jiang

PLOS ONE, 2026, vol. 21, issue 10, 1-22

Abstract: To avoid the additional computational cost and algorithmic latency introduced by short-time Fourier transformation and waveform reconstruction, we propose CGAN-SECA, which incorporates a squeeze-and-excitation channel attention mechanism to enhance noisy speech directly in the time domain. The generator employs a symmetric encoder-decoder backbone with skip connections to reconstruct waveform samples and reduce information loss during down-sampling and up-sampling. SECA adaptively recalibrates channel-wise feature responses, enabling the network to emphasize speech-relevant representations under complex noise. In the discriminator, Virtual Batch Normalization (VBN) and Dropout are introduced to regularize adversarial training. Least-squares adversarial objectives replace cross-entropy-based objectives, and an L1 reconstruction term encourages sample-level fidelity. The method is evaluated on VoiceBank-DEMAND, which contains environmental and babble noise, and on the THCHS30-DNS Challenge dataset under multiple Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) conditions. On VoiceBank-DEMAND, CGAN-SECA achieved PESQ and STOI scores of 3.018 and 0.954, respectively, ranking second only to CMGAN and outperforming the remaining comparison methods. CGAN-SECA also maintained fast inference, with a real-time factor (RTF) of 0.00423. On the THCHS30-DNS Challenge dataset, CGAN-SECA achieved the highest average PESQ and STOI scores among all evaluated methods, reaching 2.274 and 0.838, respectively, across the −5, 0, and 5 dB conditions. In particular, it produced the best results for both metrics at 0 and 5 dB, demonstrating effective speech enhancement and good generalization across different noise levels and datasets.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0359641 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 59641&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0359641

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0359641

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().