Low bitrate informed source separation of realistic mixtures

Demixing consists in recovering the sounds that compose a multichannel mix. Important applications include karaoke or respatialization. Several approaches to this problem have been proposed in a coding/decoding framework, which are denoted either as spatial audio object coding or informed source separation. They assume that the constituent sounds are available at an encoding stage and used to compute a side-information transmitted to the end-user. At a decoding stage, only the mixtures and the side information are used to recover the sources. Here, we propose an advanced model, which encompasses many practical scenarios and permits to reach bitrates as low as 0:5kbps/source. First, the sources may be mono or multichannel. Second, the mixing process is assumed to be diffuse, generalizing the usual linear-instantaneous or convolutive cases and permitting professional mixes to be processed. Third, the signals to be recovered may either be the original sources or their spatial images.