An Improved Technique for Blind Audio Source Separation

A blind audio source separation technique with an ill-posed mixing matrix and additive noise is proposed in this work. With this technique, we divide the solution into two steps. The first step is to estimate the ill-posed mixing matrix and the second step is to separate original sources. To estimate the ill-posed mixing matrix, an enhanced soft-assignment method is used in the first step. Then, the generalized p-norm optimization method is adopted in the second step, which can yield a solution sparser than the l1-norm minimization technique. Experimental results on synthetic mixtures and real-world mixtures are used to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed technique in the presence of an ill-posed mixing matrix and additive noise.