Estimation of the number of sound sources using support vector machines and its application to sound source separation

A method of estimating the number of sound sources in a reverberant sound field is proposed in this paper. It is known that the eigenvalue distribution of the spatial correlation matrix calculated from a multiple microphone input reflects information on the number of sources. However, in a reverberant sound field, the feature of the number of sources in the eigenvalue distribution is degraded by the room reverberation. In this paper, support vector machines is applied to classify the eigenvalue distributions which are not clearly separable. The proposed method is then applied to the source separation system and is evaluated via automatic speech recognition.