Blind audio source separation using two expectation-maximization algorithms

The problem of multi-microphone blind audio source separation in noisy environment is addressed. The estimation of the acoustic signals and the associated parameters is carried out using the expectation-maximization algorithm. Two separation algorithms are developed using either deterministic representation or stochastic Gaussian distribution for modelling the speech signals. Under the deterministic model, the speech sources are estimated in the M-step by applying in parallel multiple minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformers, while under the stochastic model, the speech signals are estimated in the E-step by applying in parallel multiple multichannel Wiener filters (MCWF). In the simulation study, we generated a large dataset of microphone signals, by convolving speech signals, with overlapping activity patterns, by measured acoustic impulse responses. It is shown that the proposed methods outperform a baseline method in terms of speech quality and intelligibility.