• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.25 no.4E
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• pp.142-147
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• 2006

Blind signal separation is known as a powerful tool for enhancing noisy speech in many real world environments. In this paper, it is demonstrated that the performance of blind signal separation can be further improved by combining with a null beamformer (NBF). Cascading the blind source separation with null beamforming is equivalent to the decomposition of the received signals into the direct parts and reverberant parts. Investigation of beam patterns of the null beamformer and blind signal separation reveals that directional null of NBF reduces mainly direct parts of the unwanted signals whereas blind signal separation reduces reverberant parts. Further, it is shown that the decomposition of received signals can be exploited to solve the local stability problem. Therefore, faster and improved separation can be obtained by removing the direct parts first by null beamforming. Simulation results using real office recordings confirm the expectation.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.211-216
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• 2013

The IVA(Independent Vector Analysis) is a well-known FD-ICA method used to solve the frequency permutation problem. It generally works quite well for blind source separation problems, but still needs some improvements in the frequency bin permutation problem. This paper proposes a post-processing method which can improve the source separation performance with the IVA by fixing the remaining frequency permutation problem. The proposed method makes use of the correlation coefficient of power ratio between frequency bins for separated signals with the IVA-based 2-channel source separation. Experimental results verified that the proposed method could fix the remaining frequency permutation problem in the IVA and improve the speech quality of the separated signals.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.24 no.2E
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• pp.54-60
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• 2005

A new multichannel blind deconvolution algorithm is proposed for speech mixtures. It employs unidirectional filters and normalization of gradient terms in the frequency domain. The proposed algorithm is shown to be approximately nonholonomic. Thus it provides improved convergence and separation performances without whitening effect for nonstationary sources such as speech and audio signals. Simulations using real world recordings confirm superior performances over existing algorithms and its usefulness for real applications.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.23 no.2E
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• pp.56-67
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• 2004

Despite abundant research outcomes of blind source separation (BSS) in many types of simulated environments, their performances are still not satisfactory to be applied to the real environments. The major obstacle may seem the finite filter length of the assumed mixing model and the nonlinear sensor noises. This paper presents a two-step speech enhancement method with multiple microphone inputs. The first step performs a frequency-domain BSS algorithm to produce multiple outputs without any prior knowledge of the mixed source signals. The second step further removes the remaining cross-channel interference by a spectral cancellation approach using a probabilistic source absence/presence detection technique. The desired primary source is detected every frame of the signal, and the secondary source is estimated in the power spectral domain using the other BSS output as a reference interfering source. Then the estimated secondary source is subtracted to reduce the cross-channel interference. Our experimental results show good separation enhancement performances on the real recordings of speech and music signals compared to the conventional BSS methods.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.807-812
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• 2020

This paper proposes a blind speech source separation algorithm using a microphone to separate only the target speech source signal in an environment in which various speech source signals are mixed. The proposed algorithm is a model of frequency domain representation based on independent component analysis method. Accordingly, for the purpose of verifying the validity of independent component analysis in the frequency domain for two speech sources, the proposed algorithm is executed by changing the type of speech sources to perform speech sources separation to verify the improvement effect. It was clarified from the experimental results by the waveform of this experiment that the two-channel speech source signals can be clearly separated compared to the original waveform. In addition, in this experiments, the proposed algorithm improves the speech source separation performance compared to the existing algorithms, from the experimental results using the target signal to interference energy ratio.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.25 no.4E
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• pp.148-153
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• 2006

A new normalized MBD algorithm is presented for nonstationary convolutive mixtures and its properties/modifications are discussed in details. The proposed algorithm normalizes the signal spectrum in the frequency domain to provide faster stable convergence and improved separation without whitening effect. Modifications such as nonholonomic constraints and off-diagonal learning to the proposed algorithm are also discussed. Simulation results using a real-world recording confirm superior performanceof the proposed algorithm and its usefulness in real world applications.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2006.06a
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• pp.365-366
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• 2006

This paper describes a pre-processing methodology which can apply to remote speech recognition system of service robot in noisy environment. By combining beamforming and blind source separation, we can overcome the weakness of beamforming (reverberation) and blind source separation (distributed noise, permutation ambiguity). As this method is designed to be implemented with hardware, we can achieve real-time execution with FPGA by using systolic array architecture.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.27 no.1E
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• pp.17-24
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• 2008

Blind speech separation (BSS) is well-known as a powerful technique for speech enhancement in many real world environments. In this paper, we propose a new application of BSS - acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) in a car environment. For this purpose, we develop a block-online BSS algorithm which provides robust separation than a batch version in changing environments with moving speakers. Simulation results using real world recordings show that the block-online BSS algorithm is very robust to speaker movement. When combined with AEC, simulation results using real audio recording in a car confirm the expectation that BSS improves double talk detection and echo suppression.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.179-186
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• 2009

This paper proposes a target speech extraction which restores speech signal of a target speaker form noisy convolutive mixture of speech and an interference source. We assume that the target speaker is known and his/her utterances are available in the training time. Incorporating the additional information extracted from the training utterances into the separation, we combine convolutive blind source separation(CBSS) and non-negative decomposition techniques, e.g., probabilistic latent variable model. The nonnegative decomposition is used to learn a set of bases from the spectrogram of the training utterances, where the bases represent the spectral information corresponding to the target speaker. Based on the learned spectral bases, our method provides two postprocessing steps for CBSS. Channel selection step finds a desirable output channel from CBSS, which dominantly contains the target speech. Reconstruct step recovers the original spectrogram of the target speech from the selected output channel so that the remained interference source and background noise are suppressed. Experimental results show that our method substantially improves the separation results of CBSS and, as a result, successfully recovers the target speech.

• Journal of Korea Society of Digital Industry and Information Management
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.131-138
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• 2014

This paper is on a stereo acoustic echo canceller with the blind signal separation for post processing. The convergence speed of the stereo acoustic echo canceller is deteriorated due to mixing two residual signals which are update signals of each echo canceller. To solve this problem, we are to use the blind signal separation(BSS) method separating the mixed signals after the echo cancellers. The blind signal separation method can extracts the source signals by means of the iterative computations with two input signals. We had verified performances of the proposed acoustic echo canceller for stereo through simulations. The results of simulations show that the acoustic echo canceller for stereo using this algorithm operates stably without divergence in the normal state. And, when the speech signals were inputted, this echo canceller achieved about 2dB higher ERLE with the BSS post processing method than without this method. This stereo echo canceller showed the best performance in the case of inputting the real voice signal.