Signal Reconstruction from Mel-spectrogram Based on Bi-level Consistency of Full-band Magnitude and Phase

We propose an optimization-based method for reconstructing a time-domain signal from a low-dimensional spectral representation such as a mel-spectrogram. Phase reconstruction has been studied to reconstruct a time-domain signal from the full-band short-time Fourier transform (STFT) magnitude. The Griffin-Lim algorithm (GLA) has been widely used because it relies only on the redundancy of STFT and is applicable to various audio signals. In this paper, we jointly reconstruct the full-band magnitude and phase by considering the bi-level relationships among the time-domain signal, its STFT coefficients, and its mel-spectrogram. The proposed method is formulated as a rigorous optimization problem and estimates the full-band magnitude based on the criterion used in GLA. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on speech, music, and environmental signals.Comment: Accepted to IEEE WASPAA 202

Neural Fast Full-Rank Spatial Covariance Analysis for Blind Source Separation

This paper describes an efficient unsupervised learning method for a neural source separation model that utilizes a probabilistic generative model of observed multichannel mixtures proposed for blind source separation (BSS). For this purpose, amortized variational inference (AVI) has been used for directly solving the inverse problem of BSS with full-rank spatial covariance analysis (FCA). Although this unsupervised technique called neural FCA is in principle free from the domain mismatch problem, it is computationally demanding due to the full rankness of the spatial model in exchange for robustness against relatively short reverberations. To reduce the model complexity without sacrificing performance, we propose neural FastFCA based on the jointly-diagonalizable yet full-rank spatial model. Our neural separation model introduced for AVI alternately performs neural network blocks and single steps of an efficient iterative algorithm called iterative source steering. This alternating architecture enables the separation model to quickly separate the mixture spectrogram by leveraging both the deep neural network and the multichannel optimization algorithm. The training objective with AVI is derived to maximize the marginalized likelihood of the observed mixtures. The experiment using mixture signals of two to four sound sources shows that neural FastFCA outperforms conventional BSS methods and reduces the computational time to about 2% of that for the neural FCA.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, accepted to EUSIPCO 202