Blind source separation for convolutive mixtures based on the joint diagonalization of power spectral density matrices

This paper studies the problem of blind separation of convolutively mixed source signals on the basis of the joint diagonalization (JD) of power spectral density matrices (PSDMs) observed at the output of the separation system. Firstly, a general framework of JD-based blind source separation (BSS) is reviewed and summarized. Special emphasis is put on the separability conditions of sources and mixing system. Secondly, the JD-based BSS is generalized to the separation of convolutive mixtures. The definition of a time and frequency dependent characteristic matrix of sources allows us to state the conditions under which the separation of convolutive mixtures is possible. Lastly, a frequency-domain approach is proposed for convolutive mixture separation. The proposed approach exploits objective functions based on a set of PSDMs. These objective functions are defined in the frequency domain, but are jointly optimized with respect to the time-domain coefficients of the unmixing system. The local permutation ambiguity problems, which are inherent to most frequency-domain approaches, are effectively avoided with the proposed algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is valid for the separation of both simulated and real-word recorded convolutive mixtures.