μNet: Ultra-Low-Memory and Low-Complexity Speech Enhancement for Embedded Digital Signal Processors

Abstract

Speech enhancement on embedded digital signal processors (DSPs) imposes strict constraints on memory footprint, computational complexity, latency, and support for integer operations. Although recent DNN-based approaches have addressed these challenges individually, no unified framework in the literature simultaneously addresses all these requirements for practical deployment. In this work, we propose μNet, an ultra-low-memory, low-complexity, and low-latency end-to-end DNN model. The proposed method requires only $90$~KB of static memory and $28$~MMACs, while supporting an algorithmic latency as low as $4$~ms with performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods of similar complexity. Our experiments demonstrate that μNet is compatible with neural accelerators and supports full integer-arithmetic operations on consumer DSP platforms such as Cadence Tensilica HiFi 4/5.