Exploiting Nonnegative Matrix Factorization with Mixed Group Sparsity Constraint to Separate Speech Signal from Single-channel Mixture with Unknown Ambient Noise

Abstract

This paper focuses on solving a challenging speech enhancement problem: improving the desired speech from a single-channel audio signal containing high-level unspecified noise (possibly environmental noise, music, other sounds, etc.). Using source separation technique, we investigate a solution combining nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) with mixed group sparsity constraint that allows exploiting generic noise spectral model to guide the separation process. The experiment performed on a set of benchmarked audio signals with different types of real-world noise shows that the proposed algorithm yields better quantitative results in term of the signal-to-distortion ratio than the previously published algorithms.

Keywords

• Speech enhancement
• source separation
• nonnegative matrix factorizarion (NMF)
• sparsity constraint
• generic source spectral model