Audio source separation with deep neural networks using the dropout algorithm

A method based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and time-frequency masking has been recently developed for binaural audio source separation. In this method, the DNNs are used to predict the Direction Of Arrival (DOA) of the audio sources with respect to the listener which is then used to generate soft time-frequency masks for the recovery/estimation of the individual audio sources. In this paper, an algorithm called ‘dropout’ will be applied to the hidden layers, affecting the sparsity of hidden units activations: randomly selected neurons and their connections are dropped during the training phase, preventing feature co-adaptation. These methods are evaluated on binaural mixtures generated with Binaural Room Impulse Responses (BRIRs), accounting a certain level of room reverberation. The results show that the proposed DNNs system with randomly removed neurons is able to achieve higher SDRs performances compared to the baseline method without the dropout algorithm.