Jointly Tracking and Separating Speech Sources Using Multiple Features and the generalized labeled multi-Bernoulli Framework

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel joint multi-speaker tracking-and-separation method based on the generalized labeled multi-Bernoulli (GLMB) multi-target tracking filter, using sound mixtures recorded by microphones. Standard multi-speaker tracking algorithms usually only track speaker locations, and ambiguity occurs when speakers are spatially close. The proposed multi-feature GLMB tracking filter treats the set of vectors of associated speaker features (location, pitch and sound) as the multi-target multi-feature observation, characterizes transitioning features with corresponding transition models and overall likelihood function, thus jointly tracks and separates each multi-feature speaker, and addresses the spatial ambiguity problem. Numerical evaluation verifies that the proposed method can correctly track locations of multiple speakers and meanwhile separate speech signals.