Improving time–frequency sparsity for enhanced audio source separation in degenerate unmixing estimation technique algorithm

In recent years, much research has been focused on separating acoustic sources from their mixtures. Degenerate Unmixing Estimation Technique (DUET) is one of the widely popular methods of Blind Source Separation (BSS) in underdetermined scenarios. DUET is based on a signal recovery sparsity algorithm whose performance is strongly influenced by sparsity in the Time-Frequency (TF) domain. Noises and an several sources in mixtures limit the sparsity resulting in performance degradation in DUET. Here an enhanced strategy has been adopted by combining DUET with adaptive noise cancellation utilising the Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Transform (DTCWT) as a pre-processor and TF refinement utilising Synchroextracting Transform (SET) as a post-processor. This improves the sparsity of sources and energy concentrations in a TF representation. Results of the signal separation performance evaluation reveal that the proposed algorithm outperforms conventional DUET in signal separation, especially in real-time scenarios.