Vocal separation using improved robust principal component analysis and post-processing

Due to the spread of the Internet and improvement of the audio compression technology, we need technologies to handle a large number of audio files. Separating singing voice from music is one of them and it is used in many applications, such as lyric retrieval and singer recognition. Recently, robust principal component analysis (RPCA) has been proposed, which makes use of repetition of a phrase in an accompaniment. We assume that there are some points to be improved in RPCA. In this paper, we propose a developed method based on the RPCA algorithm. First, we propose the extended RPCA algorithm that makes use of the two features of the spectrogram. Second, we apply simple post-processing to remove noise effectively. Lastly, we experiment our algorithm using the MIR-1K dataset and confirm that the proposed algorithm shows better separation performance than the conventional RPCA method.