Blind speech separation using a joint model of speech production

We propose a new blind signal separation (BSS)technique, developed specifically for speech, that exploits a priori knowledge of speech production mechanisms. In our approach, the autoregressive (AR) structure and fundamental frequency ( 0) production mechanisms of speech are jointly modeled. We compare the separation performance of our joint AR-F0 algorithm to existing BSS algorithms that model either speech’s AR structure [1] or 0 [2] individually. Experimental results indicate that the joint algorithm demonstrates superior separation performance to both the individual AR algorithm (up to 77% improvement) and F0 (up to 50% improvement) algorithms. This suggests that speech separation performance is improved by employing a BSS model with a more realistic description of the speech production process.