The ideal interaural parameter mask: A bound on binaural separation systems

Abstract

We introduce the Ideal Interaural Parameter Mask as an upper bound on the performance of mask-based source separation algorithms that are based on the differences between signals from two microphones or ears. With two additions to our Model-based EM Source Separation and Localization system, its performance approaches that of the IIPM upper bound to within 0.9 dB. These additions battle the effects of reverberation by absorbing reverberant energy and by forcing the ILD estimate to be larger than it might otherwise be. An oracle reliability measure was also added, in the hope that estimating parameters from more reliable regions of the spectrogram would improve separation, but it was not consistently useful. ©2009 IEEE.