MULTICHANNEL NOISE REDUCTION USING DILATED MULTICHANNEL U-NET AND PRE-TRAINED SINGLE-CHANNEL NETWORK

Pre-trained single-channel neural networks have become more prevalent for noise reduction in recent years. However, unlike their multichannel counterparts, these monoaural approaches do not exploit spatial information during the optimization process. Furthermore, while multichannel neural networks exploit spatial information, they are optimized for a specific microphone array configuration; extensive data collection and training are required if a new array configuration is deployed. We propose a transfer learning approach that leverages existing pre-trained single-channel neural networks for the optimization of multichannel neural networks. Simulation results on the CHiME-3 dataset show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art multichannel neural network and neural beamformer.