A Study on the Benefits of Phase-Aware Speech Enhancement in Challenging Noise Scenarios

In recent years, there has been a renaissance of research on the role of the spectral phase in single-channel speech enhancement. One of the recent proposals is to not only estimate the clean speech phase but also use this phase estimate as an additional source of information to facilitate the estimation of the clean speech magnitude. To assess the potential benefit of such approaches, in this paper we systematically explore in which situations additional information about the clean speech phase is most valuable. For this, we compare the performance of phase-aware and phase-blind clean speech estimators in different noise scenarios, i.e. at different signal to noise ratios (SNRs) and for noise sources with different degrees of stationarity. Interestingly, the results indicate that the greatest benefits can be achieved in situations where conventional magnitude-only speech enhancement is most challenging, namely in highly non-stationary noises at low SNRs.