Multichannel audio signal source separation based on an Interchannel Loudness Vector Sum

In this paper, a Blind Source Separation (BSS) algorithm for multichannel audio contents is proposed. Unlike common BSS algorithms targeting stereo audio contents or microphone array signals, our technique is targeted at multichannel audio such as 5.1 and 7.1ch audio. Since most multichannel audio object sources are panned using the Inter-channel Loudness Difference (ILD), we employ the ILVS (Inter-channel Loudness Vector Sum) concept to cluster common signals (such as background music) from each channel. After separating the common signals from each channel, we employ an Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm with a von-Mises distribution to successfully classify the clustering of sound source objects and separate the audio signals from the original mixture. Our proposed method can therefore separate common audio signals and object source signals from multiple channels with reasonable quality. Our multichannel audio content separation technique can be applied to an upmix system or a cinema audio system requiring multichannel audio source separation.