Blind separation of convolutive mixtures based on second order and third order statistics

This paper addresses the problem of blind separation of linear convolutive mixtures. We first reformulate the problem into a blind separation of linear instantaneous mixtures, and then a statistical approach is applied to solve the reformulated problem. From the statistics of the mixtures, two kinds of matrix pencils are constructed to estimate the mixing matrix. The original sources are then separated with the estimated mixing matrix. For the purpose of computational efficiency and robustness, in the matrix pencil, one matrix is constructed from the second order statistics, and the other is constructed from the third order statistics. The proposed novel methods do not require the exact knowledge of the channel order. Simulation results show that the methods are robust and have good performance.published_or_final_versio

Convolutive Blind Source Separation Methods

In this chapter, we provide an overview of existing algorithms for blind source separation of convolutive audio mixtures. We provide a taxonomy, wherein many of the existing algorithms can be organized, and we present published results from those algorithms that have been applied to real-world audio separation tasks

Efficient Multiband Algorithms for Blind Source Separation

The problem of blind separation refers to recovering original signals, called source signals, from the mixed signals, called observation signals, in a reverberant environment. The mixture is a function of a sequence of original speech signals mixed in a reverberant room. The objective is to separate mixed signals to obtain the original signals without degradation and without prior information of the features of the sources. The strategy used to achieve this objective is to use multiple bands that work at a lower rate, have less computational cost and a quicker convergence than the conventional scheme. Our motivation is the competitive results of unequal-passbands scheme applications, in terms of the convergence speed. The objective of this research is to improve unequal-passbands schemes by improving the speed of convergence and reducing the computational cost. The first proposed work is a novel maximally decimated unequal-passbands scheme.This scheme uses multiple bands that make it work at a reduced sampling rate, and low computational cost. An adaptation approach is derived with an adaptation step that improved the convergence speed. The performance of the proposed scheme was measured in different ways. First, the mean square errors of various bands are measured and the results are compared to a maximally decimated equal-passbands scheme, which is currently the best performing method. The results show that the proposed scheme has a faster convergence rate than the maximally decimated equal-passbands scheme. Second, when the scheme is tested for white and coloured inputs using a low number of bands, it does not yield good results; but when the number of bands is increased, the speed of convergence is enhanced. Third, the scheme is tested for quick changes. It is shown that the performance of the proposed scheme is similar to that of the equal-passbands scheme. Fourth, the scheme is also tested in a stationary state. The experimental results confirm the theoretical work. For more challenging scenarios, an unequal-passbands scheme with over-sampled decimation is proposed; the greater number of bands, the more efficient the separation. The results are compared to the currently best performing method. Second, an experimental comparison is made between the proposed multiband scheme and the conventional scheme. The results show that the convergence speed and the signal-to-interference ratio of the proposed scheme are higher than that of the conventional scheme, and the computation cost is lower than that of the conventional scheme