Informed multiple-f0 estimation applied to monaural audio source separation

This paper proposes a new informed source separation technique which combines music transcription with source separation. The presented system is based on a coder/decoder configuration where a classic (not informed) multiple-F₀ estimation is applied on each separated source signal assumed known at the coder before the mixing process. Thus, the extra information required to recover the reference transcription of each isolated instrument is computed and inaudibly embedded into the mixture using a watermarking technique. At the decoder, where the original source signals are unknown, instruments are separated from the mixture using the informed transcription of each source signal. In this paper, we show that a classic (non-informed) F₀ estimator can be used to reduce the amount of bits necessary to transmit the exact transcription of each isolated instrument.