Shifted NMF Using an Efficient Constant-Q Transform for Monaural Sound Source Separation

Non-negative Matrix Factorisation (NMF) based algorithms have found application in monaural audio source separation due to their ability to factorize audio spectrogram into additive part-based basis functions, which typically corresponds to individual notes or chords in music. These separated basis functions are usually greater in number than the active sources, hence clustering is needed for individual source signal synthesis. Although, many attempts have been made to improve the clustering of the basis functions to sources, much research is still required in this area. Recently, Shifted NMF based methods have been proposed as a means to avoid clustering these pitched basis functions to sources. However, the Shifted NMF algorithm uses a log-frequency spectrogram with a fixed number of frequency bins per octave which compromises the quality of separated sources.We show that by replacing the method used to calculate the log-frequency spectrogram with a recently proposed invertible Constant Q Transform (CQT), we can considerably improve the separation quality of the individual sound signal