Underdetermined blind source separation using normalized spatial covariance matrix and multichannel nonnegative matrix factorization

This paper solves the problem in underdetermined convolutive mixture by improving the disadvantages of the multichannel nonnegative matrix factorization technique widely used in blind source separation. In conventional researches based on Spatial Covariance Matrix (SCM), each element composed of values such as power gain of single channel and correlation tends to degrade the quality of the separated sources due to high variance. In this paper, level and frequency normalization is performed to effectively cluster the estimated sources. Therefore, we propose a novel SCM and an effective distance function for cluster pairs. In this paper, the proposed SCM is used for the initialization of the spatial model and used for hierarchical agglomerative clustering in the bottom-up approach. The proposed algorithm was experimented using the ‘Signal Separation Evaluation Campaign 2008 development dataset’. As a result, the improvement in most of the performance indicators was confirmed by utilizing the ‘Blind Source Separation Eval toolbox’, an objective source separation quality verification tool, and especially the performance superiority of the typical SDR of 1 dB to 3.5 dB was verified.