Variational Bayesian EM algorithm for modeling mixtures of non-stationary signals in the time-frequency domain (HR-NMF)

We recently introduced the high-resolution nonnegative matrix factorization (HR-NMF) model for analyzing mixtures of nonstationary signals in the time-frequency domain, and highlighted its capability to both reach high spectral resolution and reconstruct high quality audio signals. In order to estimate the model parameters and the latent components, we proposed to resort to an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm based on a Kalman filter/smoother. The approach proved to be appropriate for modeling audio signals in applications such as source separation and audio inpainting. However, its computational cost is high, dominated by the Kalman filter/smoother, and may be prohibitive when dealing with high-dimensional signals. In this paper, we consider two different alternatives, using the variational Bayesian EM algorithm and two mean-field approximations. We show that, while significantly reducing the complexity of the estimation, these novel approaches do not alter its quality.