Estimating competing speaker count for blind speech source separation

We present a method for estimating the number of simultaneous speakers for direct integration with blind speech source separation algorithms. The method was developed to use single microphone recordings but is fully compatible with microphone-array approaches. Speech source separation algorithms based on independent component analysis, multiband analysis or spectral learning need the number of concurrent speakers as an input parameter. This is estimated based on pattern matching techniques between the spectrogram of the speech mixture and the ones associated to a set of single speaker references. The method demonstrated to scale up until at least 10 concurrent speakers. Additionally we highlight the separation performance of various speech separation algorithms using mixtures with 3 competing speeches.