A Fast and Efficient Frequency-Domain Method for Convolutive Blind Source Separation

In this paper, the problem of blind separation of a convolutive mixture of audio signals is considered. A fast and efficient frequency-domain blind source separation (BSS) method using Independent component analysis (ICA) is investigated. The main difficulties of this approach lie in the so called permutation and amplitude problems. In order to solve the permutation ambiguity, the final value of the ICA derived separation matrix of one frequency bin, is used to initialize the ICA iterations in the next frequency bin. The amplitude problem is addressed by utilizing the elements in the inverse of the separation matrix. Experimental results demonstrate that successful separation is achieved and compared with conventional frequency-domain BSS methods, it is less computationally complex and has faster convergence

A geometrically constrained multimodal approach for convolutive blind source separation

A novel constrained multimodal approach for convolutive blind source separation is presented which incorporates video information related to geometrical position of both the speakers and the microphones, and the directionality of the speakers into the separation algorithm. The separation is performed in the frequency domain and the constraints are incorporated through a penalty function-based formulation. The separation results show a considerable improvement over traditional frequency domain convolutive BSS systems such as that developed by Parra and Spence. Importantly, the inherent permutation problem in the frequency domain BSS is potentially solve

Evaluation of emerging frequency domain convolutive blind source separation algorithms based on real room recordings

This paper presents a comparative study of three of the emerging frequency domain convolutive blind source separation (FDCBSS) techniques i.e. convolutive blind separation of non-stationary sources due to Parra and Spence, penalty function-based joint diagonalization approach for convolutive blind separation of nonstationary sources due to Wang et al. and a geometrically constrained multimodal approach for convolutive blind source separation due to Sanei et al. Objective evaluation is performed on the basis of signal to interference ratio (SIR), performance index (PI) and solution to the permutation problem. The results confirm that a multimodal approach is necessary to properly mitigate the permutation in BSS and ultimately to solve the cocktail party problem. In other words, it is to make BSS semiblind by exploiting prior geometrical information, and thereby providing the framework to find robust solutions for more challenging source separation with moving speakers

Underdetermined blind source separation of audio sources in time-frequency domain

International audienceThis paper considers the blind separation of audio sources in the underdetermined case, where we have more sources than sensors. A recent algorithm applies time-frequency distributions (TFDs) to this problem and gives good separation performance in the case where sources are disjoint in the time-frequency (TF) plane. However, in the non-disjoint case, the reconstruction of the signals requires some interpolation at the intersection points in the TF plane. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm that combines the abovementioned method with subspace projection in order to explicitly treat non-disjoint sources. Another contribution of this paper is the estimation of the mixing matrix in the underdetermined case

A modified underdetermined blind source separation algorithm using competitive learning

The problem of underdetermined blind source separation is addressed. An advanced classification method based upon competitive learning is proposed for automatically determining the number of active sources over the observation. Its introduction in underdetermined blind source separation successfully overcomes the drawback of an existing method, in which the goal of separating more sources than the number of available mixtures is achieved by exploiting the sparsity of the non-stationary sources in the time-frequency domain. Simulation studies are presented to support the proposed approach