Latent Gaussian Activity Propagation: Using Smoothness and Structure to Separate and Localize Sounds in Large Noisy Environments

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 31 (NeurIPS 2018)

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Authors

Daniel Johnson, Daniel Gorelik, Ross E. Mawhorter, Kyle Suver, Weiqing Gu, Steven Xing, Cody Gabriel, Peter Sankhagowit

Abstract

We present an approach for simultaneously separating and localizing multiple sound sources using recorded microphone data. Inspired by topic models, our approach is based on a probabilistic model of inter-microphone phase differences, and poses separation and localization as a Bayesian inference problem. We assume sound activity is locally smooth across time, frequency, and location, and use the known position of the microphones to obtain a consistent separation. We compare the performance of our method against existing algorithms on simulated anechoic voice data and find that it obtains high performance across a variety of input conditions.