A two-stage frequency-domain blind source separation method for underdetermined convolutive mixtures

This paper proposes a two-stage method for the blind separation of convolutively mixed sources. We employ time-frequency masking, which can be applied even to an underdetermined case where the number of sensors is insufficient for the number of sources. In the first stage of the method, frequency bin-wise mixtures are classified based on Gaussian mixture model fitting. In the second stage, the permutation ambiguities of the bin-wise classified signals are aligned by clustering the posterior probability sequences calculated in the first stage. Experimental results for separating four speeches with three microphones under reverberant conditions show the superiority of the proposed method over existing methods based on time-difference-of-arrival estimations or signal envelope clustering.