Spectro-temporal post-enhancement using MMSE estimation in NMF based single-channel source separation

We propose to use minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimates to enhance the signals that are separated by nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF). In single channel source separation (SCSS), NMF is used to train a set of basis vectors for each source from their training spectrograms. Then NMF is used to decompose the mixed signal spectrogram as a weighted linear combination of the trained basis vectors from which estimates of each corresponding source can be obtained. In this work, we deal with the spectrogram of each separated signal as a 2D distorted signal that needs to be restored. A multiplicative distortion model is assumed where the logarithm of the true signal distribution is modeled with a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and the distortion is modeled as having a log-normal distribution. The parameters of the GMM are learned from training data whereas the distortion parameters are learned online from each separated signal. The initial source estimates are improved and replaced with their MMSE estimates under this new probabilistic framework. The experimental results show that using the proposed MMSE estimation technique as a post enhancement after NMF improves the quality of the separated signal

Switching Principal Component Analysis for Modeling Means and Covariance Changes Over Time

Many psychological theories predict that cognitions, affect, action tendencies, and other variables change across time in mean level as well as in covariance structure. Often such changes are rather abrupt, because they are caused by sudden events. To capture such changes, one may repeatedly measure the variables under study for a single individual and examine whether the resulting multivariate time series contains a number of phases with different means and covariance structures. The latter task is challenging, however. First, in many cases, it is unknown how many phases there are and when new phases start. Second, often a rather large number of variables is involved, complicating the interpretation of the covariance pattern within each phase. To take up this challenge, we present switching principal component analysis (PCA). Switching PCA detects phases of consecutive observations or time points (in single subject data) with similar means and/or covariation structures, and performs a PCA per phase to yield insight into its covariance structure. An algorithm for fitting switching PCA solutions as well as a model selection procedure are presented and evaluated in a simulation study. Finally, we analyze empirical data on cardiorespiratory recordings

Factor analysed hidden Markov models for speech recognition

Recently various techniques to improve the correlation model of feature vector elements in speech recognition systems have been proposed. Such techniques include semi-tied covariance HMMs and systems based on factor analysis. All these schemes have been shown to improve the speech recognition performance without dramatically increasing the number of model parameters compared to standard diagonal covariance Gaussian mixture HMMs. This paper introduces a general form of acoustic model, the factor analysed HMM. A variety of configurations of this model and parameter sharing schemes, some of which correspond to standard systems are examined. An EM algorithm for the parameter optimisation is presented along with a number of methods to increase the efficiency of training. The performance of FAHMMs on medium to large vocabulary continuous speech recognition tasks is investigated. The experiments show that without elaborate complexity control an equivalent or better performance compared to a standard diagonal covariance Gaussian mixture HMM system can be achieved with considerably fewer parameters