Structured Sparsity Models for Multiparty Speech Recovery from Reverberant Recordings

We tackle the multi-party speech recovery problem through modeling the acoustic of the reverberant chambers. Our approach exploits structured sparsity models to perform room modeling and speech recovery. We propose a scheme for characterizing the room acoustic from the unknown competing speech sources relying on localization of the early images of the speakers by sparse approximation of the spatial spectra of the virtual sources in a free-space model. The images are then clustered exploiting the low-rank structure of the spectro-temporal components belonging to each source. This enables us to identify the early support of the room impulse response function and its unique map to the room geometry. To further tackle the ambiguity of the reflection ratios, we propose a novel formulation of the reverberation model and estimate the absorption coefficients through a convex optimization exploiting joint sparsity model formulated upon spatio-spectral sparsity of concurrent speech representation. The acoustic parameters are then incorporated for separating individual speech signals through either structured sparse recovery or inverse filtering the acoustic channels. The experiments conducted on real data recordings demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for multi-party speech recovery and recognition.Comment: 31 page

Knot polynomial identities and quantum group coincidences

We construct link invariants using the $D_{2n}$ subfactor planar algebras, and use these to prove new identities relating certain specializations of colored Jones polynomials to specializations of other quantum knot polynomials. These identities can also be explained by coincidences between small modular categories involving the even parts of the $D_{2n}$ planar algebras. We discuss the origins of these coincidences, explaining the role of $SO$ level-rank duality, Kirby-Melvin symmetry, and properties of small Dynkin diagrams. One of these coincidences involves $G_2$ and does not appear to be related to level-rank duality.Comment: 50 pages, many figures (this version corrects a sign error in the G_2 braiding

On Khovanov's cobordism theory for su(3) knot homology

We reconsider the su(3) link homology theory defined by Khovanov in math.QA/0304375 and generalized by Mackaay and Vaz in math.GT/0603307. With some slight modifications, we describe the theory as a map from the planar algebra of tangles to a planar algebra of (complexes of) `cobordisms with seams' (actually, a `canopolis'), making it local in the sense of Bar-Natan's local su(2) theory of math.GT/0410495. We show that this `seamed cobordism canopolis' decategorifies to give precisely what you'd both hope for and expect: Kuperberg's su(3) spider defined in q-alg/9712003. We conjecture an answer to an even more interesting question about the decategorification of the Karoubi envelope of our cobordism theory. Finally, we describe how the theory is actually completely computable, and give a detailed calculation of the su(3) homology of the (2,n) torus knots.Comment: 49 page