Evaluations on underdetermined blind source separation in adverse environments using time-frequency masking

The successful implementation of speech processing systems in the real world depends on its ability to handle adverse acoustic conditions with undesirable factors such as room reverberation and background noise. In this study, an extension to the established multiple sensors degenerate unmixing estimation technique (MENUET) algorithm for blind source separation is proposed based on the fuzzy c-means clustering to yield improvements in separation ability for underdetermined situations using a nonlinear microphone array. However, rather than test the blind source separation ability solely on reverberant conditions, this paper extends this to include a variety of simulated and real-world noisy environments. Results reported encouraging separation ability and improved perceptual quality of the separated sources for such adverse conditions. Not only does this establish this proposed methodology as a credible improvement to the system, but also implies further applicability in areas such as noise suppression in adverse acoustic environments

Convolutive Blind Source Separation Methods

In this chapter, we provide an overview of existing algorithms for blind source separation of convolutive audio mixtures. We provide a taxonomy, wherein many of the existing algorithms can be organized, and we present published results from those algorithms that have been applied to real-world audio separation tasks

Video-aided model-based source separation in real reverberant rooms

Source separation algorithms that utilize only audio data can perform poorly if multiple sources or reverberation are present. In this paper we therefore propose a video-aided model-based source separation algorithm for a two-channel reverberant recording in which the sources are assumed static. By exploiting cues from video, we first localize individual speech sources in the enclosure and then estimate their directions. The interaural spatial cues, the interaural phase difference and the interaural level difference, as well as the mixing vectors are probabilistically modeled. The models make use of the source direction information and are evaluated at discrete timefrequency points. The model parameters are refined with the wellknown expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. The algorithm outputs time-frequency masks that are used to reconstruct the individual sources. Simulation results show that by utilizing the visual modality the proposed algorithm can produce better timefrequency masks thereby giving improved source estimates. We provide experimental results to test the proposed algorithm in different scenarios and provide comparisons with both other audio-only and audio-visual algorithms and achieve improved performance both on synthetic and real data. We also include dereverberation based pre-processing in our algorithm in order to suppress the late reverberant components from the observed stereo mixture and further enhance the overall output of the algorithm. This advantage makes our algorithm a suitable candidate for use in under-determined highly reverberant settings where the performance of other audio-only and audio-visual methods is limited

Robust variational Bayesian clustering for underdetermined speech separation

The main focus of this thesis is the enhancement of the statistical framework employed for underdetermined T-F masking blind separation of speech. While humans are capable of extracting a speech signal of interest in the presence of other interference and noise; actual speech recognition systems and hearing aids cannot match this psychoacoustic ability. They perform well in noise and reverberant free environments but suffer in realistic environments. Time-frequency masking algorithms based on computational auditory scene analysis attempt to separate multiple sound sources from only two reverberant stereo mixtures. They essentially rely on the sparsity that binaural cues exhibit in the time-frequency domain to generate masks which extract individual sources from their corresponding spectrogram points to solve the problem of underdetermined convolutive speech separation. Statistically, this can be interpreted as a classical clustering problem. Due to analytical simplicity, a finite mixture of Gaussian distributions is commonly used in T-F masking algorithms for modelling interaural cues. Such a model is however sensitive to outliers, therefore, a robust probabilistic model based on the Student's t-distribution is first proposed to improve the robustness of the statistical framework. This heavy tailed distribution, as compared to the Gaussian distribution, can potentially better capture outlier values and thereby lead to more accurate probabilistic masks for source separation. This non-Gaussian approach is applied to the state-of the-art MESSL algorithm and comparative studies are undertaken to confirm the improved separation quality. A Bayesian clustering framework that can better model uncertainties in reverberant environments is then exploited to replace the conventional expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm within a maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) framework. A variational Bayesian (VB) approach is then applied to the MESSL algorithm to cluster interaural phase differences thereby avoiding the drawbacks of MLE; specifically the probable presence of singularities and experimental results confirm an improvement in the separation performance. Finally, the joint modelling of the interaural phase and level differences and the integration of their non-Gaussian modelling within a variational Bayesian framework, is proposed. This approach combines the advantages of the robust estimation provided by the Student's t-distribution and the robust clustering inherent in the Bayesian approach. In other words, this general framework avoids the difficulties associated with MLE and makes use of the heavy tailed Student's t-distribution to improve the estimation of the soft probabilistic masks at various reverberation times particularly for sources in close proximity. Through an extensive set of simulation studies which compares the proposed approach with other T-F masking algorithms under different scenarios, a significant improvement in terms of objective and subjective performance measures is achieved

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

Informed algorithms for sound source separation in enclosed reverberant environments

While humans can separate a sound of interest amidst a cacophony of contending sounds in an echoic environment, machine-based methods lag behind in solving this task. This thesis thus aims at improving performance of audio separation algorithms when they are informed i.e. have access to source location information. These locations are assumed to be known a priori in this work, for example by video processing. Initially, a multi-microphone array based method combined with binary time-frequency masking is proposed. A robust least squares frequency invariant data independent beamformer designed with the location information is utilized to estimate the sources. To further enhance the estimated sources, binary time-frequency masking based post-processing is used but cepstral domain smoothing is required to mitigate musical noise. To tackle the under-determined case and further improve separation performance at higher reverberation times, a two-microphone based method which is inspired by human auditory processing and generates soft time-frequency masks is described. In this approach interaural level difference, interaural phase difference and mixing vectors are probabilistically modeled in the time-frequency domain and the model parameters are learned through the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. A direction vector is estimated for each source, using the location information, which is used as the mean parameter of the mixing vector model. Soft time-frequency masks are used to reconstruct the sources. A spatial covariance model is then integrated into the probabilistic model framework that encodes the spatial characteristics of the enclosure and further improves the separation performance in challenging scenarios i.e. when sources are in close proximity and when the level of reverberation is high. Finally, new dereverberation based pre-processing is proposed based on the cascade of three dereverberation stages where each enhances the twomicrophone reverberant mixture. The dereverberation stages are based on amplitude spectral subtraction, where the late reverberation is estimated and suppressed. The combination of such dereverberation based pre-processing and use of soft mask separation yields the best separation performance. All methods are evaluated with real and synthetic mixtures formed for example from speech signals from the TIMIT database and measured room impulse responses