A Least-Squares Approach to Blind Source Separation in Multispeaker Environments
|
| Title | A Least-Squares Approach to Blind Source Separation in Multispeaker Environments |
| Authors | |
| Abstract | We are proposing a new approach to the solution of the cocktail party problem (CPP). The goal of the CPP is to isolate the speech signals of individuals who are concurrently talking while being recorded with a properly positioned microphone array. The new approach provides a powerful yet simple alternative to commonly used methods for the separation of speakers. It relies on the existence of so called exclusive activity periods (EAPs) in the source signals. EAPs are time intervals during which only one source is active and all other sources are inactive (i.e. zero). The existence of EAPs is not guaranteed for arbitrary signal classes. EAPs occur very frequently, however, in recordings of conversational speech. The methods proposed in this paper show how EAPs can be detected and how they can be exploited to improve the performance of blind source separation systems in speech processing applications. We consider both, the instantaneous mixture and the convolutive mixture case. A comparison of the proposed method with other popular source separation methods is drawn. The results show an improved performance of the proposed method over earlier approaches. |
| Publisher | ACADEMY PUBLISHER |
| Date | 2007-09-01 |
| Source | Journal of Computers Vol 2, No 7 (2007) |
| Rights | Copyright © ACADEMY PUBLISHER - All Rights Reserved.To request permission, please check out URL: http://www.academypublisher.com/copyrightpermission.html. |