Designing nearly tight window for improving time-frequency masking

Abstract: Many audio signal processing methods are formulated in the time-frequency (T-F) domain which is obtained by the short-time Fourier transform (STFT). The properties of the STFT are fully characterized by window function, number of frequency channels, and time-shift. Thus, designing a better window is important for improving the performance of the processing especially when a less redundant T-F representation is desirable. While many window functions have been proposed in the literature, they are designed to have a good frequency response for analysis, which may not perform well in terms of signal processing. The window design must take the effect of the reconstruction (from the T-F domain into the time domain) into account for improving the performance. In this paper, an optimization-based design method of a nearly tight window is proposed to obtain a window performing well for the T-F domain signal processing.