Shift-Invariant Kernel Additive Modelling for Audio Source Separation

A major goal in blind source separation to identify and separate sources is to model their inherent characteristics. While most state-of-the-art approaches are supervised methods trained on large datasets, interest in non-data-driven approaches such as Kernel Additive Modelling (KAM) remains high due to their interpretability and adaptability. KAM performs the separation of a given source applying robust statistics on the time-frequency bins selected by a source-specific kernel function, commonly the K-NN function. This choice assumes that the source of interest repeats in both time and frequency. In practice, this assumption does not always hold. Therefore, we introduce a shift-invariant kernel function capable of identifying similar spectral content even under frequency shifts. This way, we can considerably increase the amount of suitable sound material available to the robust statistics. While this leads to an increase in separation performance, a basic formulation, however, is computationally expensive. Therefore, we additionally present acceleration techniques that lower the overall computational complexity.Comment: Feedback is welcom

Blind source separation using statistical nonnegative matrix factorization

PhD ThesisBlind Source Separation (BSS) attempts to automatically extract and track a signal of interest in real world scenarios with other signals present. BSS addresses the problem of recovering the original signals from an observed mixture without relying on training knowledge. This research studied three novel approaches for solving the BSS problem based on the extensions of non-negative matrix factorization model and the sparsity regularization methods. 1) A framework of amalgamating pruning and Bayesian regularized cluster nonnegative tensor factorization with Itakura-Saito divergence for separating sources mixed in a stereo channel format: The sparse regularization term was adaptively tuned using a hierarchical Bayesian approach to yield the desired sparse decomposition. The modified Gaussian prior was formulated to express the correlation between different basis vectors. This algorithm automatically detected the optimal number of latent components of the individual source. 2) Factorization for single-channel BSS which decomposes an information-bearing matrix into complex of factor matrices that represent the spectral dictionary and temporal codes: A variational Bayesian approach was developed for computing the sparsity parameters for optimizing the matrix factorization. This approach combined the advantages of both complex matrix factorization (CMF) and variational -sparse analysis. BLIND SOURCE SEPARATION USING STATISTICAL NONNEGATIVE MATRIX FACTORIZATION ii 3) An imitated-stereo mixture model developed by weighting and time-shifting the original single-channel mixture where source signals can be modelled by the AR processes. The proposed mixing mixture is analogous to a stereo signal created by two microphones with one being real and another virtual. The imitated-stereo mixture employed the nonnegative tensor factorization for separating the observed mixture. The separability analysis of the imitated-stereo mixture was derived using Wiener masking. All algorithms were tested with real audio signals. Performance of source separation was assessed by measuring the distortion between original source and the estimated one according to the signal-to-distortion (SDR) ratio. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed uninformed audio separation algorithms have surpassed among the conventional BSS methods; i.e. IS-cNTF, SNMF and CMF methods, with average SDR improvement in the ranges from 2.6dB to 6.4dB per source.Payap Universit

An Experimental Study of Reduced-Voltage Operation in Modern FPGAs for Neural Network Acceleration

We empirically evaluate an undervolting technique, i.e., underscaling the circuit supply voltage below the nominal level, to improve the power-efficiency of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) accelerators mapped to Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Undervolting below a safe voltage level can lead to timing faults due to excessive circuit latency increase. We evaluate the reliability-power trade-off for such accelerators. Specifically, we experimentally study the reduced-voltage operation of multiple components of real FPGAs, characterize the corresponding reliability behavior of CNN accelerators, propose techniques to minimize the drawbacks of reduced-voltage operation, and combine undervolting with architectural CNN optimization techniques, i.e., quantization and pruning. We investigate the effect of environmental temperature on the reliability-power trade-off of such accelerators. We perform experiments on three identical samples of modern Xilinx ZCU102 FPGA platforms with five state-of-the-art image classification CNN benchmarks. This approach allows us to study the effects of our undervolting technique for both software and hardware variability. We achieve more than 3X power-efficiency (GOPs/W) gain via undervolting. 2.6X of this gain is the result of eliminating the voltage guardband region, i.e., the safe voltage region below the nominal level that is set by FPGA vendor to ensure correct functionality in worst-case environmental and circuit conditions. 43% of the power-efficiency gain is due to further undervolting below the guardband, which comes at the cost of accuracy loss in the CNN accelerator. We evaluate an effective frequency underscaling technique that prevents this accuracy loss, and find that it reduces the power-efficiency gain from 43% to 25%.Comment: To appear at the DSN 2020 conferenc

Methods for Model Complexity Reduction for the Nonlinear Calibration of Amplifiers Using Volterra Kernels

Volterra models allow modeling nonlinear dynamical systems, even though they require the estimation of a large number of parameters and have, consequently, potentially large computational costs. The pruning of Volterra models is thus of fundamental importance to reduce the computational costs of nonlinear calibration, and improve stability and speed, while preserving accuracy. Several techniques (LASSO, DOMP and OBS) and their variants (WLASSO and OBD) are compared in this paper for the experimental calibration of an IF amplifier. The results show that Volterra models can be simplified, yielding models that are 4–5 times sparser, with a limited impact on accuracy. About 6 dB of improved Error Vector Magnitude (EVM) is obtained, improving the dynamic range of the amplifiers. The Symbol Error Rate (SER) is greatly reduced by calibration at a large input power, and pruning reduces the model complexity without hindering SER. Hence, pruning allows improving the dynamic range of the amplifier, with almost an order of magnitude reduction in model complexity. We propose the OBS technique, used in the neural network field, in conjunction with the better known DOMP technique, to prune the model with the best accuracy. The simulations show, in fact, that the OBS and DOMP techniques outperform the others, and OBD, LASSO and WLASSO are, in turn, less efficient. A methodology for pruning in the complex domain is described, based on the Frisch–Waugh–Lovell (FWL) theorem, to separate the linear and nonlinear sections of the model. This is essential because linear models are used for equalization and cannot be pruned to preserve model generality vis-a-vis channel variations, whereas nonlinear models must be pruned as much as possible to minimize the computational overhead. This methodology can be extended to models other than the Volterra one, as the only conditions we impose on the nonlinear model are that it is feedforward and linear in the parameters