On the Optimality of Ideal Binary Time-Frequency Masks

Abstract

The concept of ideal binary time-frequency masks has received attention recently in monaural and binaural sound separation. Although often assumed, the optimality of ideal binary masks in terms of signal-to-noise ratio has not been rigorously addressed. In this paper we give a formal treatment on this issue and clarify the conditions for ideal binary masks to be optimal. We also experimentally compare the performance of ideal binary masks to that of ideal ratio masks on a speech mixture database and a music database. The results show that ideal binary masks are close in performance to ideal ratio masks which are closely related to the Wiener filter, the theoretically optimal linear filter.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 01, 2007
Accession Number
AD1001225

Entities

People

  • DeLiang Wang
  • Yipeng Li

Organizations

  • Ohio State University

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acoustic Signals
  • Cognitive Systems Engineering
  • Computer Science
  • Databases
  • Decomposition
  • Engineering
  • Filters
  • Frequency
  • Frequency Domain
  • Frequency Response
  • Index Terms
  • Indexes
  • Noise
  • Power Spectra
  • Speech
  • Time Domain
  • Waveforms

Readers

  • Mathematical Modeling and Probability Theory.
  • Radio communications and signal processing.
  • Speech Processing/Speech Recognition.