Beyond NMF: Time-domain audio source separation without phase reconstruction

This paper presents a new fundamental technique for source separation of single-channel audio signals. Although non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) has recently become very popular for music source separation, it deals only with the amplitude or power of the spectrogram of a given mix-ture signal and completely discards the phase. The compo-nent spectrograms are typically estimated using a Wiener filter that reuses the phase of the mixture spectrogram, but such rough phase reconstruction makes it hard to recover high-quality source signals because the estimated spectro-grams are inconsistent, i.e., they do not correspond to any real time-domain signals. To avoid the frequency-domain phase reconstruction, we use positive semidefinite tensor factorization (PSDTF) for directly estimating source sig-nals from the mixture signal in the time domain. Since PS-DTF is a natural extension of NMF, an efficient multiplica-tive update algorithm for PSDTF can be derived. Experi-mental results show that PSDTF outperforms conventional NMF variants in terms of source separation quality. 1