Modeling the Comb Filter Effect and Interaural Coherence for Binaural Source Separation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel binaural source separation model that leverages both direct sound and early reflections, modeling the comb filter effect and interaural coherence to improve separation performance in reverberant environments.

Contribution

It proposes a new method that incorporates early reflection and interaural coherence modeling into binaural source separation, enhancing accuracy over existing approaches.

Findings

Improved separation performance in reverberant rooms.

Utilization of interaural phase difference enhances separation.

Modeling multipath effects yields better results than baseline methods.

Abstract

Typical methods for binaural source separation consider only the direct sound as the target signal in a mixture. However, in most scenarios, this assumption limits the source separation performance. It is well known that the early reflections interact with the direct sound, producing acoustic effects at the listening position, e.g. the so-called comb filter effect. In this article, we propose a novel source separation model, that utilizes both the direct sound and the first early reflection information to model the comb filter effect. This is done by observing the interaural phase difference obtained from the time-frequency representation of binaural mixtures. Furthermore, a method is proposed to model the interaural coherence of the signals. Including information related to the sound multipath propagation, the performance of the proposed separation method is improved with respect to the baselines that did not use such information, as illustrated by using binaural recordings made in four rooms, having different sizes and reverberation times.