A robust approach to reverberant blind source separation in the presence of noise for arbitrarily arranged sensors

Considerable attention has been devoted to the reverberant blind source separation problem: in particular, the concept of time-frequency masking. However, realistic acoustic scenarios often comprise not only reverberation, but also additive noise due to factors such as non-ideal channels. This paper...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jafari, I., Togneri, R., Nordholm, Sven
Other Authors: Akihiko Sugiyama
Format: Conference Paper
Published: The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 2012
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/18549
Description
Summary:Considerable attention has been devoted to the reverberant blind source separation problem: in particular, the concept of time-frequency masking. However, realistic acoustic scenarios often comprise not only reverberation, but also additive noise due to factors such as non-ideal channels. This paper presents robust evaluations of a time-frequency masking approach for separation in such realistic conditions. The fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm is used to cluster spatial feature cues into a time-frequency mask. Experimental results demonstrated superiority in separation, with notable improvements in the SNR additionally observed. Not only does this establish the proposed scheme viable for reverberant blind source separation, but also as a credible means of speech enhancement in the presence of additive broadband noise.