Blind source separation of many signals in the frequency domain

This paper describes the frequency-domain blind source separation (BSS) of convolutively mixed acoustic signals using independent component analysis (ICA). The most critical issue related to frequency domain BSS is the permutation problem. This paper presents two methods for solving this problem. Both methods are based on the clustering of information derived from a separation matrix obtained by ICA. The first method is based on direction of arrival (DOA) clustering. This approach is intuitive and easy to understand. The second method is based on normalized basis vector clustering. This method is less intuitive than the DOA based method, but it has several advantages. First, it does not need sensor array geometry information. Secondly, it can fully utilize the information contained in the separation matrix, since the clustering is performed in high-dimensional space. Experimental results show that our methods realize BSS in various situations such as the separation of many speech signals located in a 3-dimensional space, and the extraction of primary sound sources surrounded by many background interferences.