Microphone Array Configuration Invariant, Streaming, Multichannel Neural Enhancement Frontend for Automatic Speech Recognition

A multichannel neural frontend speech enhancement model for speech recognition includes a speech cleaner, a stack of self-attention blocks each having a multi-headed self attention mechanism, and a masking layer. The speech cleaner receives, as input, a multichannel noisy input signal and a multichannel contextual noise signal, and generates, as output, a single channel cleaned input signal. The stack of self-attention blocks receives, as input, at an initial block of the stack of self-attention blocks, a stacked input including the single channel cleaned input signal and a single channel noisy input signal, and generates, as output, from a final block of the stack of self-attention blocks, an un-masked output. The masking layer receives, as input, the single channel noisy input signal and the un-masked output, and generates, as output, enhanced input speech features corresponding to a target utterance.