Harvesting Partially-Disjoint Time-Frequency Information for Improving Degenerate Unmixing Estimation Technique

The degenerate unmixing estimation technique (DUET) is one of the most efficient blind source separation algorithms tackling the challenging situation when the number of sources exceeds the number of microphones. However, as a time-frequency mask-based method, DUET erroneously results in interference components retention when source signals overlap each other in both frequency and time domains. In this paper, to avoid the erroneous retention, instead of masking, we propose to use multiple linear spatial filters (e.g., the minimum variance distortionless response filter) to extract the desired signals. These filters are constructed based on the information embedded in the detected single-source-points, that is, time-frequency points contributed by a single source. In comparison with the conventional DUET, our method achieved an impressive improvement greater than 5 dB in the source-to-interference ratio and 2 to 5 dB improvement in the source-to-distortion ratio, respectively. Findings are substantiated by unmixing simulation using live-recorded mixture signals from up to four sources. Audio examples can be found on the web page: "https://ydcnanhe.github.io/demoicassp2022/"