BLIND SOURCE SEPARATION OF SPATIO-TEMPORAL MIXED SIGNALS USING PHASE INFORMATION OF ANALYTIC WAVELET TRANSFORM

The cocktail party problem deals with the specialized human listening ability to focus one's listening attention on a single talker among a cacophony of conversations and background noises. The blind source separation problem is how to enable computers to solve the cocktail party problem in a satisfactory manner. The simplest version of spatio-temporal mixture problem, which is a type of blind source separation problem, has been solved by a generalized version of the quotient signal estimation method based on the analytic wavelet transform, under the assumption that the time delays are integer multiples of the sampling period. The analytic wavelet transform is used to represent time-frequency information of observed signals. Without the above assumption, improved algorithms, utilizing phase information of the analytic wavelet transforms of the observed signals, are proposed. A series of numerical simulations is presented.