Influence of Clean Speech Characteristics on Speech Enhancement Performance

Speech enhancement (SE) performance is known to depend on noise characteristics and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), yet intrinsic properties of the clean speech signal itself remain an underexplored factor. In this work, we systematically analyze how clean speech characteristics influence enhancement difficulty across multiple state-of-the-art SE models, languages, and noise conditions. We extract a set of pitch, formant, loudness, and spectral flux features from clean speech and compute correlations with objective SE metrics, including frequency weighted segmental SNR and PESQ. Our results show that formant amplitudes are consistently predictive of SE performance, with higher and more stable formants leading to larger enhancement gains. We further demonstrate that performance varies substantially even within a single speaker’s utterances, highlighting the importance of intra-speaker acoustic variability. These findings provide new insights into SE challenges, suggesting that intrinsic speech characteristics should be considered when designing datasets, evaluation protocols, and enhancement models.