Sound Source Separation: Preprocessing for Hearing Aids and Structured Audio Coding

In this paper we consider the problem of separating different sound sources in multichannel audio signals. Different approaches to the problem of Blind Source Separation (BSS), e.g. the Independent Component Analysis (ICA) originally proposed by Herault and Jutten, and extensions to this including delays, work fine for artificially mixed signals. However the quality of the separated signals is severely degraded for real sound recordings when there is reverberation. We consider the system with 2 sources and 2 sensors, and show how we can improve the quality of the separation by a simple model of the audio scene. More specifically we estimate the delays between the sensor signals, and put constraints on the deconvolution coefficients.

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