Beyond the Narrowband Approximation: Wideband Convex Methods for Under-Determined Reverberant Audio Source Separation

Matthieu Kowalski, Emmanuel Vincent, Rémi Gribonval
2010 IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing  
We consider the problem of extracting the source signals from an under-determined convolutive mixture assuming known mixing filters. State-of-the-art methods operate in the time-frequency domain and rely on narrowband approximation of the convolutive mixing process by complex-valued multiplication in each frequency bin. The source signals are then estimated by minimizing either a mixture fitting cost or a 1 source sparsity cost, under possible constraints on the number of active sources. In
more » ... article, we define a wideband 2 mixture fitting cost circumventing the above approximation and investigate the use of a 1,2 mixed-norm cost promoting disjointness of the source timefrequency representations. We design a family of convex functionals combining these costs and derive suitable optimization algorithms. Experiments indicate that the proposed wideband methods result in a signal-to-distortion ratio improvement of 2 to 4 dB compared to the state-of-the-art on reverberant speech mixtures.
doi:10.1109/tasl.2010.2050089 fatcat:tsixdi6uibgxnkgf55ldagagxu