A Penalty Function Promoting Sparsity Within and Across Groups

We introduce a new weakly-convex penalty function for signals with a group behavior. The penalty promotes signals with a few number of active groups, where within each group, only a few high magnitude coefficients are active. We derive the threshold function associated with the proposed penalty and study its properties. We discuss how the proposed penalty/threshold function can be useful for signals with isolated non-zeros, such as audio with isolated harmonics along the frequency axis, or reflection functions in exploration seismology where the non-zeros occur on the boundaries of subsoil layers. We demonstrate the use of the proposed penalty/threshold functions in a convex denoising and a non-convex deconvolution formulation. We provide convergent algorithms for both formulations and compare the performance with state-of-the-art methods

Sparsity Within and Across Overlapping Groups

Recently, penalties promoting signals that are sparse within and across groups have been proposed. In this letter, we propose a generalization that allows to encode more intricate dependencies within groups. However, this complicates the realization of the threshold function associated with the penalty, which hinders the use of the penalty in energy minimization. We discuss how to sidestep this problem, and demonstrate the use of the modified penalty in an energy minimization formulation for an inverse problem

SWAGGER: Sparsity Within and Across Groups for General Estimation and Recovery

Penalty functions or regularization terms that promote structured solutions to optimization problems are of great interest in many fields. Proposed in this work is a nonconvex structured sparsity penalty that promotes one-sparsity within arbitrary overlapping groups in a vector. This allows one to enforce mutual exclusivity between components within solutions to optimization problems. We show multiple example use cases (including a total variation variant), demonstrate synergy between it and other regularizers, and propose an algorithm to efficiently solve problems regularized or constrained by the proposed penalty.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure

Determined BSS based on time-frequency masking and its application to harmonic vector analysis

This paper proposes harmonic vector analysis (HVA) based on a general algorithmic framework of audio blind source separation (BSS) that is also presented in this paper. BSS for a convolutive audio mixture is usually performed by multichannel linear filtering when the numbers of microphones and sources are equal (determined situation). This paper addresses such determined BSS based on batch processing. To estimate the demixing filters, effective modeling of the source signals is important. One successful example is independent vector analysis (IVA) that models the signals via co-occurrence among the frequency components in each source. To give more freedom to the source modeling, a general framework of determined BSS is presented in this paper. It is based on the plug-and-play scheme using a primal-dual splitting algorithm and enables us to model the source signals implicitly through a time-frequency mask. By using the proposed framework, determined BSS algorithms can be developed by designing masks that enhance the source signals. As an example of its application, we propose HVA by defining a time-frequency mask that enhances the harmonic structure of audio signals via sparsity of cepstrum. The experiments showed that HVA outperforms IVA and independent low-rank matrix analysis (ILRMA) for both speech and music signals. A MATLAB code is provided along with the paper for a reference