25 research outputs found
Improved Convolutive and Under-Determined Blind Audio Source Separation with MRF Smoothing
Convolutive and under-determined blind audio source separation from noisy recordings is a challenging problem. Several computational strategies have been proposed to address this problem. This study is concerned with several modifications to the expectation-minimization-based algorithm, which iteratively estimates the mixing and source parameters. This strategy assumes that any entry in each source spectrogram is modeled using superimposed Gaussian components, which are mutually and individually independent across frequency and time bins. In our approach, we resolve this issue by considering a locally smooth temporal and frequency structure in the power source spectrograms. Local smoothness is enforced by incorporating a Gibbs prior in the complete data likelihood function, which models the interactions between neighboring spectrogram bins using a Markov random field. Simulations using audio files derived from stereo audio source separation evaluation campaign 2008 demonstrate high efficiency with the proposed improvement
Statistical single channel source separation
PhD ThesisSingle channel source separation (SCSS) principally is one of the challenging fields
in signal processing and has various significant applications. Unlike conventional
SCSS methods which were based on linear instantaneous model, this research sets out
to investigate the separation of single channel in two types of mixture which is
nonlinear instantaneous mixture and linear convolutive mixture. For the nonlinear
SCSS in instantaneous mixture, this research proposes a novel solution based on a
two-stage process that consists of a Gaussianization transform which efficiently
compensates for the nonlinear distortion follow by a maximum likelihood estimator to
perform source separation. For linear SCSS in convolutive mixture, this research
proposes new methods based on nonnegative matrix factorization which decomposes a
mixture into two-dimensional convolution factor matrices that represent the spectral
basis and temporal code. The proposed factorization considers the convolutive mixing
in the decomposition by introducing frequency constrained parameters in the model.
The method aims to separate the mixture into its constituent spectral-temporal source
components while alleviating the effect of convolutive mixing. In addition, family of
Itakura-Saito divergence has been developed as a cost function which brings the
beneficial property of scale-invariant. Two new statistical techniques are proposed,
namely, Expectation-Maximisation (EM) based algorithm framework which
maximizes the log-likelihood of a mixed signals, and the maximum a posteriori
approach which maximises the joint probability of a mixed signal using multiplicative
update rules. To further improve this research work, a novel method that incorporates
adaptive sparseness into the solution has been proposed to resolve the ambiguity and
hence, improve the algorithm performance. The theoretical foundation of the proposed
solutions has been rigorously developed and discussed in details. Results have
concretely shown the effectiveness of all the proposed algorithms presented in this
thesis in separating the mixed signals in single channel and have outperformed others
available methods.Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka(UTeM),
Ministry of Higher Education of Malaysi
Audio source separation for music in low-latency and high-latency scenarios
Aquesta tesi proposa mètodes per tractar les limitacions de les tècniques existents de separació de fonts musicals en condicions de baixa i alta latència. En primer lloc, ens centrem en els mètodes amb un baix cost computacional i baixa latència. Proposem l'ús de la regularització de Tikhonov com a mètode de descomposició de l'espectre en el context de baixa latència. El comparem amb les tècniques existents en tasques d'estimació i seguiment dels tons, que són passos crucials en molts mètodes de separació. A continuació utilitzem i avaluem el mètode de descomposició de l'espectre en tasques de separació de veu cantada, baix i percussió. En segon lloc, proposem diversos mètodes d'alta latència que milloren la separació de la veu cantada, gràcies al modelatge de components específics, com la respiració i les consonants. Finalment, explorem l'ús de correlacions temporals i anotacions manuals per millorar la separació dels instruments de percussió i dels senyals musicals polifònics complexes.Esta tesis propone métodos para tratar las limitaciones de las técnicas existentes de separación de fuentes musicales en condiciones de baja y alta latencia. En primer lugar, nos centramos en los métodos con un bajo coste computacional y baja latencia. Proponemos el uso de la regularización de Tikhonov como método de descomposición del espectro en el contexto de baja latencia. Lo comparamos con las técnicas existentes en tareas de estimación y seguimiento de los tonos, que son pasos cruciales en muchos métodos de separación. A continuación utilizamos y evaluamos el método de descomposición del espectro en tareas de separación de voz cantada, bajo y percusión. En segundo lugar, proponemos varios métodos de alta latencia que mejoran la separación de la voz cantada, gracias al modelado de componentes que a menudo no se toman en cuenta, como la respiración y las consonantes. Finalmente, exploramos el uso de correlaciones temporales y anotaciones manuales para mejorar la separación de los instrumentos de percusión y señales musicales polifónicas complejas.This thesis proposes specific methods to address the limitations of current music source separation methods in low-latency and high-latency scenarios. First, we focus on methods with low computational cost and low latency. We propose the use of Tikhonov regularization as a method for spectrum decomposition in the low-latency context. We compare it to existing techniques in pitch estimation and tracking tasks, crucial steps in many separation methods. We then use the proposed spectrum decomposition method in low-latency separation tasks targeting singing voice, bass and drums. Second, we propose several high-latency methods that improve the separation of singing voice by modeling components that are often not accounted for, such as breathiness and consonants. Finally, we explore using temporal correlations and human annotations to enhance the separation of drums and complex polyphonic music signals
Principled methods for mixtures processing
This document is my thesis for getting the habilitation à diriger des recherches, which is the french diploma that is required to fully supervise Ph.D. students. It summarizes the research I did in the last 15 years and also provides the shortterm research directions and applications I want to investigate. Regarding my past research, I first describe the work I did on probabilistic audio modeling, including the separation of Gaussian and αstable stochastic processes. Then, I mention my work on deep learning applied to audio, which rapidly turned into a large effort for community service. Finally, I present my contributions in machine learning, with some works on hardware compressed sensing and probabilistic generative models.My research programme involves a theoretical part that revolves around probabilistic machine learning, and an applied part that concerns the processing of time series arising in both audio and life sciences
Single channel overlapped-speech detection and separation of spontaneous conversations
PhD ThesisIn the thesis, spontaneous conversation containing both speech mixture and speech dialogue is considered. The speech mixture refers to speakers speaking simultaneously (i.e. the overlapped-speech). The speech dialogue refers to only one speaker is actively speaking and the other is silent. That Input conversation is firstly processed by the overlapped-speech detection. Two output signals are then segregated into dialogue and mixture formats. The dialogue is processed by speaker diarization. Its outputs are the individual speech of each speaker. The mixture is processed by speech separation. Its outputs are independent separated speech signals of the speaker. When the separation input contains only the mixture, blind speech separation approach is used. When the separation is assisted by the outputs of the speaker diarization, it is informed speech separation. The research presents novel: overlapped-speech detection algorithm, and two speech separation algorithms.
The proposed overlapped-speech detection is an algorithm to estimate the switching instants of the input. Optimization loop is adapted to adopt the best capsulated audio features and to avoid the worst. The optimization depends on principles of the pattern recognition, and k-means clustering. For of 300 simulated conversations, averages of: False-Alarm Error is 1.9%, Missed-Speech Error is 0.4%, and Overlap-Speaker Error is 1%. Approximately, these errors equal the errors of best recent reliable speaker diarization corpuses.
The proposed blind speech separation algorithm consists of four sequential techniques: filter-bank analysis, Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), speaker clustering and filter-bank synthesis. Instead of the required speaker segmentation, effective standard framing is contributed. Average obtained objective tests (SAR, SDR and SIR) of 51 simulated conversations are: 5.06dB, 4.87dB and 12.47dB respectively.
For the proposed informed speech separation algorithm, outputs of the speaker diarization are a generated-database. The database associated the speech separation by creating virtual targeted-speech and mixture. The contributed virtual signals are trained to facilitate the separation by homogenising them with the NMF-matrix elements of the real mixture. Contributed masking optimized the resulting speech. Average obtained SAR, SDR and SIR of 341 simulated conversations are 9.55dB, 1.12dB, and 2.97dB respectively.
Per the objective tests of the two speech separation algorithms, they are in the mid-range of the well-known NMF-based audio and speech separation methods
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Single Channel auditory source separation with neural network
Although distinguishing different sounds in noisy environment is a relative easy task for human, source separation has long been extremely difficult in audio signal processing. The problem is challenging for three reasons: the large variety of sound type, the abundant mixing conditions and the unclear mechanism to distinguish sources, especially for similar sounds.
In recent years, the neural network based methods achieved impressive successes in various problems, including the speech enhancement, where the task is to separate the clean speech out of the noise mixture. However, the current deep learning based source separator does not perform well on real recorded noisy speech, and more importantly, is not applicable in a more general source separation scenario such as overlapped speech.
In this thesis, we firstly propose extensions for the current mask learning network, for the problem of speech enhancement, to fix the scale mismatch problem which is usually occurred in real recording audio. We solve this problem by combining two additional restoration layers in the existing mask learning network. We also proposed a residual learning architecture for the speech enhancement, further improving the network generalization under different recording conditions. We evaluate the proposed speech enhancement models on CHiME 3 data. Without retraining the acoustic model, the best bi-direction LSTM with residue connections yields 25.13% relative WER reduction on real data and 34.03% WER on simulated data.
Then we propose a novel neural network based model called “deep clustering” for more general source separation tasks. We train a deep network to assign contrastive embedding vectors to each time-frequency region of the spectrogram in order to implicitly predict the segmentation labels of the target spectrogram from the input mixtures. This yields a deep network-based analogue to spectral clustering, in that the embeddings form a low-rank pairwise affinity matrix that approximates the ideal affinity matrix, while enabling much faster performance. At test time, the clustering step “decodes” the segmentation implicit in the embeddings by optimizing K-means with respect to the unknown assignments. Experiments on single channel mixtures from multiple speakers show that a speaker-independent model trained on two-speaker and three speakers mixtures can improve signal quality for mixtures of held-out speakers by an average over 10dB.
We then propose an extension for deep clustering named “deep attractor” network that allows the system to perform efficient end-to-end training. In the proposed model, attractor points for each source are firstly created the acoustic signals which pull together the time-frequency bins corresponding to each source by finding the centroids of the sources in the embedding space, which are subsequently used to determine the similarity of each bin in the mixture to each source. The network is then trained to minimize the reconstruction error of each source by optimizing the embeddings. We showed that this frame work can achieve even better results.
Lastly, we introduce two applications of the proposed models, in singing voice separation and the smart hearing aid device. For the former, a multi-task architecture is proposed, which combines the deep clustering and the classification based network. And a new state of the art separation result was achieved, where the signal to noise ratio was improved by 11.1dB on music and 7.9dB on singing voice. In the application of smart hearing aid device, we combine the neural decoding with the separation network. The system firstly decodes the user’s attention, which is further used to guide the separator for the targeting source. Both objective study and subjective study show the proposed system can accurately decode the attention and significantly improve the user experience
Uma investigação sobre métodos de separação cega de fontes sonoras envolvendo representações não-negativas e diversidade espacial
The problem of blind source separation finds many applications across different areas, thus justifying the ever increasing number of works in this topic. This work focuses on studying this problem for sound sources, employing non-negative signals’ representations, while also taking advantage of the spatial diversity induced by the use of multiple channels; this particular feature has recently opened up new research directions regarding the proper modeling of multichannel source separation This work studies two different algorithms: NMF-SCM (sound source separation using non-negative matrix factorization and direction-of-arrival-based spatial covariance model), whose model represents the state of the art, taking in consideration not only the characteristics of the sources but also the enviroment into which they were captured on; and NTF (non-negative tensor factorization), whose simplified model is the multichannel equivalent of NMF (non-negative matrix factorization). During the development of this work both algorithms were implemented. A vectorized and parallelized NMF-SCM implementation is presented; and some improvements are proposed to the NTF algorithm, as well as a method for blind determination of the number of sources in multichannel mixtures.A separação cega de fontes é um problema com diversas aplicações em várias áreas e que, por isso, vem sendo alvo de um grande número de pesquisas. Este trabalho foca no estudo do problema de separação cega de fontes sonoras utilizando representações não-negativas com o aproveitamento da diversidade espacial permitido pelo desenvolvimento de métodos multicanais, que abriram novas oportunidades de pesquisa e resultaram no surgimento de novas modelagens para o problema de separação de fontes. Neste trabalho são estudados dois algoritmos distintos, a NMF-SCM (separação de áudio multicanal utilizando fatoração não-negativa de matrizes e com modelo de covariância espacial baseado em direção-de-chegada), que representa o estado da arte da modelagem deste problema, modelando não apenas as características das fontes, mas também o ambiente em que a mistura foi capturada; e a NTF (fatoração de tensores não-negativos), que apresenta uma modelagem simplificada do problema multicanal, de forma análoga à NMF (fatoração não-negativa de matrizes), e que não utiliza explicitamente a diversidade espacial. Durante o desenvolvimento deste trabalho ambos os algoritmos foram implementados. Uma versão vetorizada e paralelizada da NMF-SCM é apresentada, assim como alterações ao algoritmo da NTF visando à melhoria em seu desempenho e também à utilização explícita da diversidade espacial. Por último, é proposto um método para a determinação cega do número de fontes presentes em misturas multicanais
Iterative Separation of Note Events from Single-Channel Polyphonic Recordings
This thesis is concerned with the separation of audio sources from single-channel polyphonic musical recordings using the iterative estimation and separation of note events. Each event is defined as a section of audio containing largely harmonic energy identified as coming from a single sound source. Multiple events can be clustered to form separated sources. This solution is a model-based algorithm that can be applied to a large variety of audio recordings without requiring previous training stages.
The proposed system embraces two principal stages. The first one considers the iterative detection and separation of note events from within the input mixture. In every iteration, the pitch trajectory of the predominant note event is automatically selected from an array of fundamental frequency estimates and used to guide the separation of the event's spectral content using two different methods: time-frequency masking and time-domain subtraction. A residual signal is then generated and used as the input mixture for the next iteration. After convergence, the second stage considers the clustering of all detected note events into individual audio sources.
Performance evaluation is carried out at three different levels. Firstly, the accuracy of the note-event-based multipitch estimator is compared with that of the baseline algorithm used in every iteration to generate the initial set of pitch estimates. Secondly, the performance of the semi-supervised source separation process is compared with that of another semi-automatic algorithm. Finally, a listening test is conducted to assess the audio quality and naturalness of the separated sources when they are used to create stereo mixes from monaural recordings.
Future directions for this research focus on the application of the proposed system to other music-related tasks. Also, a preliminary optimisation-based approach is presented as an alternative method for the separation of overlapping partials, and as a high resolution time-frequency representation for digital signals
Efficient and Robust Methods for Audio and Video Signal Analysis
This thesis presents my research concerning audio and video signal processing and machine learning. Specifically, the topics of my research include computationally efficient classifier compounds, automatic speech recognition (ASR), music dereverberation, video cut point detection and video classification.Computational efficacy of information retrieval based on multiple measurement modalities has been considered in this thesis. Specifically, a cascade processing framework, including a training algorithm to set its parameters has been developed for combining multiple detectors or binary classifiers in computationally efficient way. The developed cascade processing framework has been applied on video information retrieval tasks of video cut point detection and video classification. The results in video classification, compared to others found in the literature, indicate that the developed framework is capable of both accurate and computationally efficient classification. The idea of cascade processing has been additionally adapted for the ASR task. A procedure for combining multiple speech state likelihood estimation methods within an ASR framework in cascaded manner has been developed. The results obtained clearly show that without impairing the transcription accuracy the computational load of ASR can be reduced using the cascaded speech state likelihood estimation process.Additionally, this thesis presents my work on noise robustness of ASR using a nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) -based approach. Specifically, methods for transformation of sparse NMF-features into speech state likelihoods has been explored. The results reveal that learned transformations from NMF activations to speech state likelihoods provide better ASR transcription accuracy than dictionary label -based transformations. The results, compared to others in a noisy speech recognition -challenge show that NMF-based processing is an efficient strategy for noise robustness in ASR.The thesis also presents my work on audio signal enhancement, specifically, on removing the detrimental effect of reverberation from music audio. In the work, a linear prediction -based dereverberation algorithm, which has originally been developed for speech signal enhancement, was applied for music. The results obtained show that the algorithm performs well in conjunction with music signals and indicate that dynamic compression of music does not impair the dereverberation performance