MCALab: Reproducible Research in Signal and Image Decomposition and Inpainting

International audienceMorphological Component Analysis (MCA) of signals and images is an ambitious and important goal in signal processing; successful methods for MCA have many far-reaching applications in science and technology. Because MCA is related to solving underdetermined systems of linear equations it might also be considered, by some, to be problematic or even intractable. Reproducible research is essential to to give such a concept a firm scientific foundation and broad base of trusted results. MCALab has been developed to demonstrate key concepts of MCA and make them available to interested researchers and technologists. MCALab is a library of Matlab routines that implement the decomposition and inpainting algorithms that we previously proposed in [1], [2], [3], [4]. The MCALab package provides the research community with open source tools for sparse decomposition and inpainting and is made available for anonymous download over the Internet. It contains a variety of scripts to reproduce the figures in our own articles, as well as other exploratory examples not included in the papers. One can also run the same experiments on one's own data or tune the parameters by simply modifying the scripts. The MCALab is under continuing development by the authors; who welcome feedback and suggestions for further enhancements, and any contributions by interested researchers

Application of sound source separation methods to advanced spatial audio systems

This thesis is related to the field of Sound Source Separation (SSS). It addresses the development and evaluation of these techniques for their application in the resynthesis of high-realism sound scenes by means of Wave Field Synthesis (WFS). Because the vast majority of audio recordings are preserved in twochannel stereo format, special up-converters are required to use advanced spatial audio reproduction formats, such as WFS. This is due to the fact that WFS needs the original source signals to be available, in order to accurately synthesize the acoustic field inside an extended listening area. Thus, an object-based mixing is required. Source separation problems in digital signal processing are those in which several signals have been mixed together and the objective is to find out what the original signals were. Therefore, SSS algorithms can be applied to existing two-channel mixtures to extract the different objects that compose the stereo scene. Unfortunately, most stereo mixtures are underdetermined, i.e., there are more sound sources than audio channels. This condition makes the SSS problem especially difficult and stronger assumptions have to be taken, often related to the sparsity of the sources under some signal transformation. This thesis is focused on the application of SSS techniques to the spatial sound reproduction field. As a result, its contributions can be categorized within these two areas. First, two underdetermined SSS methods are proposed to deal efficiently with the separation of stereo sound mixtures. These techniques are based on a multi-level thresholding segmentation approach, which enables to perform a fast and unsupervised separation of sound sources in the time-frequency domain. Although both techniques rely on the same clustering type, the features considered by each of them are related to different localization cues that enable to perform separation of either instantaneous or real mixtures.Additionally, two post-processing techniques aimed at improving the isolation of the separated sources are proposed. The performance achieved by several SSS methods in the resynthesis of WFS sound scenes is afterwards evaluated by means of listening tests, paying special attention to the change observed in the perceived spatial attributes. Although the estimated sources are distorted versions of the original ones, the masking effects involved in their spatial remixing make artifacts less perceptible, which improves the overall assessed quality. Finally, some novel developments related to the application of time-frequency processing to source localization and enhanced sound reproduction are presented.Cobos Serrano, M. (2009). Application of sound source separation methods to advanced spatial audio systems [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/8969Palanci

Non-Negative Group Sparsity with Subspace Note Modelling for Polyphonic Transcription

This work was supported by EPSRC Platform Grant EPSRC EP/K009559/1, EPSRC Grant EP/L027119/1, and EPSRC Grant EP/J010375/1

Dictionary Learning for Sparse Representations With Applications to Blind Source Separation.

During the past decade, sparse representation has attracted much attention in the signal processing community. It aims to represent a signal as a linear combination of a small number of elementary signals called atoms. These atoms constitute a dictionary so that a signal can be expressed by the multiplication of the dictionary and a sparse coefficients vector. This leads to two main challenges that are studied in the literature, i.e. sparse coding (find the coding coefficients based on a given dictionary) and dictionary design (find an appropriate dictionary to fit the data). Dictionary design is the focus of this thesis. Traditionally, the signals can be decomposed by the predefined mathematical transform, such as discrete cosine transform (DCT), which forms the so-called analytical approach. In recent years, learning-based methods have been introduced to adapt the dictionary from a set of training data, leading to the technique of dictionary learning. Although this may involve a higher computational complexity, learned dictionaries have the potential to offer improved performance as compared with predefined dictionaries. Dictionary learning algorithm is often achieved by iteratively executing two operations: sparse approximation and dictionary update. We focus on the dictionary update step, where the dictionary is optimized with a given sparsity pattern. A novel framework is proposed to generalize benchmark mechanisms such as the method of optimal directions (MOD) and K-SVD where an arbitrary set of codewords and the corresponding sparse coefficients are simultaneously updated, hence the term simultaneous codeword optimization (SimCO). Moreover, its extended formulation ‘regularized SimCO’ mitigates the major bottleneck of dictionary update caused by the singular points. First and second order optimization procedures are designed to solve the primitive and regularized SimCO. In addition, a tree-structured multi-level representation of dictionary based on clustering is used to speed up the optimization process in the sparse coding stage. This novel dictionary learning algorithm is also applied for solving the underdetermined blind speech separation problem, leading to a multi-stage method, where the separation problem is reformulated as a sparse coding problem, with the dictionary being learned by an adaptive algorithm. Using mutual coherence and sparsity index, the performance of a variety of dictionaries for underdetermined speech separation is compared and analyzed, such as the dictionaries learned from speech mixtures and ground truth speech sources, as well as those predefined by mathematical transforms. Finally, we propose a new method for joint dictionary learning and source separation. Different from the multistage method, the proposed method can simultaneously estimate the mixing matrix, the dictionary and the sources in an alternating and blind manner. The advantages of all the proposed methods are demonstrated over the state-of-the-art methods using extensive numerical tests

Automatic large-scale classification of bird sounds is strongly improved by unsupervised feature learning

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0

Computational Methods for Underdetermined Convolutive Speech Localization and Separation via Model-based Sparse Component Analysis

In this paper, the problem of speech source localization and separation from recordings of convolutive underdetermined mixtures is studied. The problem is cast as recovering the spatio-spectral speech information embedded in a microphone array compressed measurements of the acoustic field. A model-based sparse component analysis framework is formulated for sparse reconstruction of the speech spectra in a reverberant acoustic resulting in joint localization and separation of the individual sources. We compare and contrast the computational approaches to model-based sparse recovery exploiting spatial sparsity as well as spectral structures underlying spectrographic representation of speech signals. In this context, we explore identification of the sparsity structures at the auditory and acoustic representation spaces. The auditory structures are formulated upon the principles of structural grouping based on proximity, autoregressive correlation and harmonicity of the spectral coefficients and they are incorporated for sparse reconstruction. The acoustic structures are formulated upon the image model of multipath propagation and they are exploited to characterize the compressive measurement matrix associated with microphone array recordings. Three approaches to sparse recovery relying on combinatorial optimization, convex relaxation and Bayesian methods are studied and evaluated based on thorough experiments. The sparse Bayesian learning method is shown to yield better perceptual quality while the interference suppression is also achieved using the combinatorial approach with the advantage of offering the most efficient computational cost. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that an average autoregressive model can be learned for speech localization and exploiting the proximity structure in the form of block sparse coefficients enables accurate localization. Throughout the extensive empirical evaluation, we confirm that a large and random placement of the microphones enables significant improvement in source localization and separation performance