Recent advances in multichannel source separation and denoising based on source sparseness

Abstract

This chapter deals with multichannel source separation and denoising based on sparseness of source signals in the time-frequency domain. In this approach, time-frequency masks are typically estimated based on clustering of source location features, such as time and level differences between microphones. In this chapter, we describe the approach and its recent advances. Especially, we introduce a recently proposed clustering method, observation vector clustering, which has attracted attention for its effectiveness. We introduce algorithms for observation vector clustering based on a complex Watson mixture model (cWMM), a complex Bingham mixture model (cBMM), and a complex Gaussian mixture model (cGMM). We show through experiments the effectiveness of observation vector clustering in source separation and denoising.