Background music separation for multichannel audio based on Inter-channel Level 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 7.1 ch audio. Since most multichannel audio object sources are panned using the Interchannel Level Difference (ILD), we employ the ILVS (Interchannel Level Vector Sum) concept to cluster common signals (such as background music) from each channel. Our proposed method can therefore separate a common audio signal from multiple channels with a lower computational complexity. Our multichannel audio content separation technique can be applied to an upmix system or a cinema audio system requiring multichannel audio source separation.