DeConformer-SENet: An efficient deformable conformer speech enhancement network

The Conformer model has demonstrated superior performance in speech enhancement by combining the long-range relationship modeling capability of self-attention with the local information processing ability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, existing Conformer-based speech enhancement models struggle to balance performance and model complexity. In this work, we propose, DeConformer-SENet, an end-to-end time-domain deformable Conformer speech enhancement model, with modifications to both the self-attention and CNN components. Firstly, we introduce the time-frequency-channel self-attention (TFC-SA) module, which compresses information from each dimension of the input features into a one-dimensional vector. By calculating the energy distribution, this module models long-range relationships across three dimensions, reducing computational complexity while maintaining performance. Additionally, we replace standard convolutions with deformable convolutions, aiming to expand the receptive field of the CNN and accurately model local features. We validate our proposed DeConformer-SENet on the WSJ0-SI84 + DNS Challenge dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that DeConformer-SENet outperforms existing Conformer and Transformer models in terms of ESTOI and PESQ metrics, while also being more computationally efficient. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm that DeConformer-SENet improvements enhance the performance of conventional Conformer and reduce model complexity without compromising the overall effectiveness.