A Lightweight Fourier-based Network for Binaural Speech Enhancement with Spatial Cue Preservation

Abstract

Binaural speech enhancement faces a severe trade-off challenge, where state-of-the-art performance is achieved by computationally intensive architectures, while lightweight solutions often come at the cost of significant performance degradation. To bridge this gap, we propose the Global Adaptive Fourier Network (GAF-Net), a lightweight deep complex network that aims to establish a balance between performance and computational efficiency. The GAF-Net architecture consists of three components. First, a dual-feature encoder combining short-time Fourier transform and gammatone features enhances the robustness of acoustic representation. Second, a channel-independent globally adaptive Fourier modulator efficiently captures long-term temporal dependencies while preserving the spatial cues. Finally, a dynamic gating mechanism is implemented to reduce processing artifacts. Experimental results show that GAF-Net achieves competitive performance, particularly in terms of binaural cues (ILD and IPD error) and objective intelligibility (MBSTOI), with fewer parameters and computational cost. These results confirm that GAF-Net provides a feasible way to achieve high-fidelity binaural processing on resource-constrained devices.