Non-negative matrix factorisation incorporating greedy hellinger sparse coding applied to polyphonic music transcription

Non-negative Matrix Factorisation (NMF) is a commonly used tool in many musical signal processing tasks, including Automatic Music Transcription (AMT). However unsupervised NMF is seen to be problematic in this context, and harmonically constrained variants of NMF have been proposed. While useful, the harmonic constraints may be constrictive in mixed signals. We have previously observed that recovery of overlapping signal elements using NMF is improved through introduction of a sparse coding step, and propose here the incorporation of a sparse coding step using the Hellinger distance into a NMF algorithm. Improved AMT results for unsupervised NMF are reported.