Reduced-rank spectral mixtures Gaussian processes for probabilistic time-frequency representations

Deterministic time-frequency representations are commonly used in signal processing, particularly in audio processing. Whilst presenting many potential advantages, their probabilistic counterparts are not widely used, essentially because of the computational load and the lack of clear interpretability of the different underlying models. However, using state space models, they have been shown recently to be equivalent to Spectral Mixtures Gaussian processes (SM-GP). This pioneer work unlocks this problem and opens the path for the development of tractable and interpretable probabilistic time-frequency analysis. In this paper, we propose a relatively simple yet a significant improvement of that work in terms of computational complexity, flexibility and practical application. To do so, we use a recent approach for covariance approximation to develop an algorithm for faster inference of SM-GP, while opting for a frequency -domain approach to hyperparameter learning. We illustrate the practical potential of our method using voiced speech data. We first show that key speech features can be accurately learned from the data. Second, we show that our method can yield better performances in denoising.