Beamspace-domain multichannel nonnegative matrix factorization for audio source separation

In this letter, we develop a multichannel blind source separation algorithm based on a beamspace transform and the multichannel nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) method. The conventional multichannel NMF algorithm performs well with multichannel mixing data, but there is still room for enhancement in multichannel real-world recording data. In this letter, we consider a beamspace-time-frequency domain data model for multichannel NMF method, and enhance the conventional method using a beamspace transform. Our decomposition algorithm is applied to 2-channel and 4-channel unsupervised audio source separation, using a dataset from the international Signal Separation Evaluation Campaign 2010 (SiSEC 2010). Our algorithm shows a better performance than the conventional NMF method in an evaluation results.