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Permutation Correction in the Frequency Domain in Blind Separation of Speech Mixtures

EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing volume 2006, Article number: 075206 (2006) Cite this article

Abstract

This paper presents a method for blind separation of convolutive mixtures of speech signals, based on the joint diagonalization of the time varying spectral matrices of the observation records. The main and still largely open problem in a frequency domain approach is permutation ambiguity. In an earlier paper of the authors, the continuity of the frequency response of the unmixing filters is exploited, but it leaves some frequency permutation jumps. This paper therefore proposes a new method based on two assumptions. The frequency continuity of the unmixing filters is still used in the initialization of the diagonalization algorithm. Then, the paper introduces a new method based on the time-frequency representations of the sources. They are assumed to vary smoothly with frequency. This hypothesis of the continuity of the time variation of the source energy is exploited on a sliding frequency bandwidth. It allows us to detect the remaining frequency permutation jumps. The method is compared with other approaches and results on real world recordings demonstrate superior performances of the proposed algorithm.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire des Images et des Signaux, BP 46, St Martin d'Hère Cedex, 38402, France

    Ch Servière

  2. Laboratoire de Modélisation et Calcul, BP 53, Grenoble Cedex, 38041, France

    DT Pham

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  1. Ch Servière
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Correspondence to Ch Servière.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Servière, C., Pham, D. Permutation Correction in the Frequency Domain in Blind Separation of Speech Mixtures. EURASIP J. Adv. Signal Process. 2006, 075206 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1155/ASP/2006/75206

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