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

Incorporating prior information in nonnegative matrix factorization for audio source separation

In this work, we propose solutions to the problem of audio source separation from a single recording. The audio source signals can be speech, music or any other audio signals. We assume training data for the individual source signals that are present in the mixed signal are available. The training data are used to build a representative model for each source. In most cases, these models are sets of basis vectors in magnitude or power spectral domain. The proposed algorithms basically depend on decomposing the spectrogram of the mixed signal with the trained basis models for all observed sources in the mixed signal. Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is used to train the basis models for the source signals. NMF is then used to decompose the mixed signal spectrogram as a weighted linear combination of the trained basis vectors for each observed source in the mixed signal. After decomposing the mixed signal, spectral masks are built and used to reconstruct the source signals. In this thesis, we improve the performance of NMF for source separation by incorporating more constraints and prior information related to the source signals to the NMF decomposition results. The NMF decomposition weights are encouraged to satisfy some prior information that is related to the nature of the source signals. The priors are modeled using Gaussian mixture models or hidden Markov models. These priors basically represent valid weight combination sequences that the basis vectors can receive for a certain type of source signal. The prior models are incorporated with the NMF cost function using either log-likelihood or minimum mean squared error estimation (MMSE). We also incorporate the prior information as a post processing. We incorporate the smoothness prior on the NMF solutions by using post smoothing processing. We also introduce post enhancement using MMSE estimation to obtain better separation for the source signals. In this thesis, we also improve the NMF training for the basis models. In cases when enough training data are not available, we introduce two di erent adaptation methods for the trained basis to better t the sources in the mixed signal. We also improve the training procedures for the sources by learning more discriminative dictionaries for the source signals. In addition, to consider a larger context in the models, we concatenate neighboring spectra together and train basis sets from them instead of a single frame which makes it possible to directly model the relation between consequent spectral frames. Experimental results show that the proposed approaches improve the performance of using NMF in source separation applications

Speech Enhancement Using an Iterative Posterior NMF

Over the years, miscellaneous methods for speech enhancement have been proposed, such as spectral subtraction (SS) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimators. These methods do not require any prior knowledge about the speech and noise signals nor any training stage beforehand, so they are highly flexible and allow implementation in various situations. However, these algorithms usually assume that the noise is stationary and are thus not good at dealing with nonstationary noise types, especially under low signal-to-noise (SNR) conditions. To overcome the drawbacks of the above methods, nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is introduced. NMF approach is more robust to nonstationary noise. In this chapter, we are actually interested in the application of speech enhancement using NMF approach. A speech enhancement method based on regularized nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) for nonstationary Gaussian noise is proposed. The spectral components of speech and noise are modeled as Gamma and Rayleigh, respectively. We propose to adaptively estimate the sufficient statistics of these distributions to obtain a natural regularization of the NMF criterion

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

Performance Evaluation of Selected Cost Functions in Non Negative Matrix Factorization Based Decomposition of Acoustic Mixture

Interaction of acoustic signals when several audio sources are active simultaneously results in the disturbance of estimation of an individual source by co-occurring sounds. Data decomposition therefore constitutes one of the core tasks in monaural source separation.  Particularly, in semi-supervised learning approach, viable means of achieving this is through the application of Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF). Owing to a paucity of information on the application of this method, especially in a speech system, evaluation of some cost functions in NMF-based monaural speech decomposition was investigated in this study. A generalized gradient descent algorithm is derived for the minimization while three cost functions: Euclidean Distance, Kullback-Leibler Divergence and Itakura-Saito divergences are applied to the derived separation NMF algorithm.  These divergences are evaluated using experimental data while the performance of each of these is evaluated based on the cost values and convergence rate. Itakura-Saito divergence yields optimal performance over the other two divergences for given number of iterations and number of channels. Keywords— Cost functions, non-negative matrix factorization, speech separation, evaluatio

Interpretable Hyperspectral AI: When Non-Convex Modeling meets Hyperspectral Remote Sensing

Hyperspectral imaging, also known as image spectrometry, is a landmark technique in geoscience and remote sensing (RS). In the past decade, enormous efforts have been made to process and analyze these hyperspectral (HS) products mainly by means of seasoned experts. However, with the ever-growing volume of data, the bulk of costs in manpower and material resources poses new challenges on reducing the burden of manual labor and improving efficiency. For this reason, it is, therefore, urgent to develop more intelligent and automatic approaches for various HS RS applications. Machine learning (ML) tools with convex optimization have successfully undertaken the tasks of numerous artificial intelligence (AI)-related applications. However, their ability in handling complex practical problems remains limited, particularly for HS data, due to the effects of various spectral variabilities in the process of HS imaging and the complexity and redundancy of higher dimensional HS signals. Compared to the convex models, non-convex modeling, which is capable of characterizing more complex real scenes and providing the model interpretability technically and theoretically, has been proven to be a feasible solution to reduce the gap between challenging HS vision tasks and currently advanced intelligent data processing models