Combining a harmonic-based NMF decomposition with transient analysis for instantaneous percussion separation

Many recent approaches on musical source separation rely on model-based inference methods that take into account the signal´s harmonic structure. To address the particular case of instantaneous percussion separation, we propose a method that combines a harmonic-based decomposition using a Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) algorithm, with the transient analysis of spectral peaks from a single audio frame. The signal model allows the estimation of harmonic and non-harmonic sources. Later, as shown in the evaluation, adding transient peak information improves the Signal-to-Distortion Ratio (SDR). Compared to other existing methods, this approach achieves a comparable performance, being suitable at the same time for low-latency conditions.