Supervised determined source separation with multichannel variational autoencoder

This letter proposes a multichannel source separation technique, the multichannel variational autoencoder (MVAE) method, which uses a conditional VAE (CVAE) to model and estimate the power spectrograms of the sources in a mixture. By training the CVAE using the spectrograms of training examples with source-class labels, we can use the trained decoder distribution as a universal generative model capable of generating spectrograms conditioned on a specified class index. By treating the latent space variables and the class index as the unknown parameters of this generative model, we can develop a convergence-guaranteed algorithm for supervised determined source separation that consists of iter-atively estimating the power spectrograms of the underlying sources, as well as the separation matrices. In experimental evaluations, our MVAE produced better separation performance than a baseline method.