Audio signal clustering and separation using a stacked autoencoder

This paper proposes a novel approach to the problem of audio signal clustering using a stacked autoencoder. The proposed stacked autoencoder learns an efficient representation for the input signal, enables clustering constituent signals with similar characteristics, and therefore the original sources can be separated based on the clustering results. STFT (Short-Time Fourier Transform) is performed to extract time-frequency spectrum, and rectangular windows at all the possible locations are used as input values to the autoencoder. The outputs at the middle, encoding layer, are used to cluster the rectangular windows and the original sources are separated by the Wiener filters derived from the clustering results. Source separation experiments were carried out in comparison to the conventional NMF (Non-negative Matrix Factorization), and the estimated sources by the proposed