English

Informed FastICA: Semi-Blind Minimum Variance Distortionless Beamformer

Signal Processing 2024-07-15 v1 Sound Audio and Speech Processing

Abstract

Non-Gaussianity-based Independent Vector Extraction leads to the famous one-unit FastICA/FastIVA algorithm when the likelihood function is optimized using an approximate Newton-Raphson algorithm under the orthogonality constraint. In this paper, we replace the constraint with the analytic form of the minimum variance distortionless beamformer (MVDR), by which a semi-blind variant of FastICA/FastIVA is obtained. The side information here is provided by a weighted covariance matrix replacing the noise covariance matrix, the estimation of which is a frequent goal of neural beamformers. The algorithm thus provides an intuitive connection between model-based blind extraction and learning-based extraction. The algorithm is tested in simulations and speaker ID-guided speaker extraction, showing fast convergence and promising performance.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2407.09259,
  title  = {Informed FastICA: Semi-Blind Minimum Variance Distortionless Beamformer},
  author = {Zbyněk Koldovský and Jiří Málek and Jaroslav Čmejla and Stephen O'Regan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.09259},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

accepted for IWAENC 2024

R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:38:39.323Z