Joint Dereverberation and Separation with Iterative Source Steering
This work addresses computational efficiency for audio signal processing researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on prior frameworks without introducing new paradigms.
The authors tackled the computational cost and stability issues of joint dereverberation and blind source separation by proposing two algorithms based on iterative source steering, which achieve the same final performance as the existing ILRMA-T method in objective metrics.
We propose a new algorithm for joint dereverberation and blind source separation (DR-BSS). Our work builds upon the IRLMA-T framework that applies a unified filter combining dereverberation and separation. One drawback of this framework is that it requires several matrix inversions, an operation inherently costly and with potential stability issues. We leverage the recently introduced iterative source steering (ISS) updates to propose two algorithms mitigating this issue. Albeit derived from first principles, the first algorithm turns out to be a natural combination of weighted prediction error (WPE) dereverberation and ISS-based BSS, applied alternatingly. In this case, we manage to reduce the number of matrix inversion to only one per iteration and source. The second algorithm updates the ILRMA-T matrix using only sequential ISS updates requiring no matrix inversion at all. Its implementation is straightforward and memory efficient. Numerical experiments demonstrate that both methods achieve the same final performance as ILRMA-T in terms of several relevant objective metrics. In the important case of two sources, the number of iterations required is also similar.