Single-channel source separation using simplified-training complex matrix factorization

Although the task seems trivial for human listeners, research in automating source separation still lags far behind human performance and is especially difficult for single-channel signals. One of the latest and most promising methods of single-channel source separation is non-negative matrix factorization, which works by synthesizing signals from a learned set of bases for each source. In this paper, we present a new method of creating these learned sets of bases used in the matrix factorization technique for single-channel source separation. This new method does not suffer the complication of choosing an optimal number of bases as in previous methods. In addition, this paper further explores the new method of complex matrix factorization and compares its performance to non-negative, real matrix factorization for automatic speech recognition of two-talker mixtures.