On the use of the Watson mixture model for clustering-based under-determined blind source separation

In this paper, we investigate the application of a generative clustering technique for the estimation of time-frequency source separation masks. Recent advances in time-frequency clustering-based approaches to blind source separation have touched upon the Watson mixture model (WMM) as a tool for source separation. However, most methods have been frequency bin-wise and have thus required the additional permutation alignment stage, and previous full-band methods which employ the WMM have yet to be applied to the under-determined setting. We propose to evaluate the clustering ability of the WMM within the clustering-based source separation framework. Evaluations confirm the superiority of the WMM against other previously used clustering techniques such as the fuzzy c-means.