Dialogue enhancement using kernel additive modelling

Abstract

It is a major problem for the sound engineers to find the right balance between the dialogue signals and the ambient sources. This problem also makes one of the main causes of the audience concerns. The audience wants to arrange the sound balance based on their personal preferences, listening environment and their hearing. In this work, a method is proposed for enhancing the dialogue signals in stereo recordings that consist of more than one source. The kernel additive modelling that has been used successfully in sound source separation is used to extract the dialogues and the ambient sources from the movie sounds. The separated dialogue and ambient sources can later be upmixed by the user to make a personal mix. The separation performance of the proposed method is evaluated on the sounds generated by mixing the sources which were taken from the only dialogue and only music parts of the movies. It has been shown that the Kernel Additive Modelling (KAM) based method can be successfully used for dialogue enhancement.