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A convex speech enhancement (CSE) method is presented based on convex optimization and pause detection of the speech sources. Channel spatial difference is identified for enhancing each speech source individually while suppressing other interfering sources. Sparse unmixing filters indicating channel spatial differences are sought by <i>l</i> ₁ norm regularization and the split Bregman method. A subdivided split Bregman method is developed for efficiently solving the problem in severely reverberant environments. The speech pause detection is based on a binary mask source separation method. The CSE method is evaluated objectively and subjectively, and found to outperform a list of existing blind speech separation approaches on both synthetic and room recorded speech mixtures in terms of the overall computational speed and separation quality.

We study sparse blind source separation (BSS) for a class of positive and partially overlapped signals. The signals are only allowed to have nonoverlapping at certain locations, while they could overlap with each other elsewhere. For nonnegative data, a novel approach has been proposed by Naanaa and Nuzillard (NN) assuming that nonoverlapping exists for each source signal at some location of acquisition variable. However, the NN method introduces errors (spurious peaks) in the output when their nonoverlapping condition is not satisfied. To resolve this problem and improve robustness of separation, postprocessing techniques are developed in two aspects. One is to detect coherent and uncertain components from NN outputs by using multiple mixture data, then removing the uncertain portion to enhance signals. The other is to find better estimation of mixing matrix by leveraging reliable source peak