NMF with time-frequency activations to model non stationary audio events

Real world sounds often exhibit non-stationary spectral characteristics such as those produced by a harpsichord or a guitar. The classical Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) needs a number of atoms to accurately decompose the spectrogram of such sounds. An extension of NMF is proposed hereafter which includes time-frequency activations based on ARMA modeling. This leads to an efficient single-atom decomposition for a single audio event. The new algorithm is tested on real audio data and shows promising results.