Summary: Correlated modulation: a criterion for blind source separation
Jörn Anemüller
Medical Physics Group and Graduate School in Psychoacoustics
Carl von Ossietzky­University, D­26111 Oldenburg, Germany
e­mail: ane@uni­oldenburg.de
Summary: The problem of blindly separating a convolutive mixture of modulated signals is consid­
ered. Spectrograms of the signals are computed and separation is performed in the frequency domain.
A new algorithm for blind source separation is proposed, which is based on correlated modulation in
the sources' different frequency channels. For example, speech contains correlated modulation in dif­
ferent frequency regions. The algorithm successfully separates mixtures of modulated artificial signals
and of speech.
To appear in: Joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the European Acoustics Association,
Berlin, Germany, March 14­19, 1999.
INTRODUCTION
The goal of blind source separation is to reconstruct mutually independent source signals s 1 (t); : : : ;
s N (t) when only mixtures m 1 (t); : : : ; mM (t) of them can be observed. A minimum set of assump­
tions regarding the probability density functions or the autocorrelation functions of the sources are
made in order to accomplish this. In particular, the geometry of the sensors and sources is com­
pletely unknown, hence the term `blind'.
The case of an instantaneous, linear, square and invertible mixing of the sources is well­understood.

Source: Anemüller, Jörn - Medical Physics Section, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg

Collections: Biology and Medicine