Low-delay nonuniform pseudo-QMF banks with application to speech enhancement

Journal ArticleAbstract-This paper presents a method for designing low-delay nonuniform pseudo quadrature mirror filter (QMF) banks. This method is motivated by the work of Li, Nguyen, and Tantaratana, in which the nonuniform filter bank is realized by combining an appropriate number of adjacent sub-bands of a uniform pseudo-QMF bank. In prior work, the prototype filter of the uniform pseudo-QMF bank was constrained to have linear phase and the overall delay associated with the filter bank was often unacceptably large for filter banks with a large number of sub-bands. This paper proposes a pseudo-QMF filter bank design technique that significantly reduces the delay by relaxing the linear phase constraints. An example in which an oversampled critical-band nonuniform filter bank is designed and applied to a two-state modeling speech enhancement system is presented in this paper. Comparison of the performance of this system to competing methods employing tree-structured, linear phase multiresolution analysis indicates that the approach described in this paper strikes a good balance between system performance and low delay

Biorthogonal partners and applications

Two digital filters H(z) and F(z) are said to be biorthogonal partners of each other if their cascade H(z)F(z) satisfies the Nyquist or zero-crossing property. Biorthogonal partners arise in many different contexts such as filterbank theory, exact and least squares digital interpolation, and multiresolution theory. They also play a central role in the theory of equalization, especially, fractionally spaced equalizers in digital communications. We first develop several theoretical properties of biorthogonal partners. We also develop conditions for the existence of biorthogonal partners and FIR biorthogonal pairs and establish the connections to the Riesz basis property. We then explain how these results play a role in many of the above-mentioned applications

Efficient Multiband Algorithms for Blind Source Separation

The problem of blind separation refers to recovering original signals, called source signals, from the mixed signals, called observation signals, in a reverberant environment. The mixture is a function of a sequence of original speech signals mixed in a reverberant room. The objective is to separate mixed signals to obtain the original signals without degradation and without prior information of the features of the sources. The strategy used to achieve this objective is to use multiple bands that work at a lower rate, have less computational cost and a quicker convergence than the conventional scheme. Our motivation is the competitive results of unequal-passbands scheme applications, in terms of the convergence speed. The objective of this research is to improve unequal-passbands schemes by improving the speed of convergence and reducing the computational cost. The first proposed work is a novel maximally decimated unequal-passbands scheme.This scheme uses multiple bands that make it work at a reduced sampling rate, and low computational cost. An adaptation approach is derived with an adaptation step that improved the convergence speed. The performance of the proposed scheme was measured in different ways. First, the mean square errors of various bands are measured and the results are compared to a maximally decimated equal-passbands scheme, which is currently the best performing method. The results show that the proposed scheme has a faster convergence rate than the maximally decimated equal-passbands scheme. Second, when the scheme is tested for white and coloured inputs using a low number of bands, it does not yield good results; but when the number of bands is increased, the speed of convergence is enhanced. Third, the scheme is tested for quick changes. It is shown that the performance of the proposed scheme is similar to that of the equal-passbands scheme. Fourth, the scheme is also tested in a stationary state. The experimental results confirm the theoretical work. For more challenging scenarios, an unequal-passbands scheme with over-sampled decimation is proposed; the greater number of bands, the more efficient the separation. The results are compared to the currently best performing method. Second, an experimental comparison is made between the proposed multiband scheme and the conventional scheme. The results show that the convergence speed and the signal-to-interference ratio of the proposed scheme are higher than that of the conventional scheme, and the computation cost is lower than that of the conventional scheme