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

A method based on L-BFGS to solve constrained complex-valued ICA

Complex-valued independent component analysis (ICA) is a celebrated method in blind separation of complex-valued signals. In this paper, we propose to transform the constrained optimization problems of complex-valued ICA into unconstrained optimization problems which can be solved by limited-memory Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno update (L-BFGS). As opposed to previous approaches, the proposed method does not apply any restriction on the Hessian matrix of ICA cost function. It can separate mixed sub-Gaussian, super-Gaussian, circular, and non-circular sources. Simulations show promising results.NRF (Natl Research Foundation, S’pore)Accepted versio

Swarm Intelligence Based Particle Filter for Alternating Talker Localization and Tracking Using Microphone Arrays

10.1109/TASLP.2017.2693566IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing2561384-139