Low Complexity Blind Separation Technique to Solve the Permutation Ambiguity of Convolutive Speech Mixtures

Microphone arrays can be incorporated in several devices ranging from hearing aids and bioacoustic recording equipment to teleconference phones and forensic sound recorders in order to attenuate the interference of unwanted sounds. The separation of speech mixtures can be easily performed on the frequency domain independently for each frequency component. However, in order to combine the separated signals of each frequency component, the permutation ambiguity should be solved. The state-of-the-art technique relies on an iterative computation of the dispersions of the differences between the source profiles. In this paper, we propose a low complexity solution for the permutation ambiguity with similar accuracy based on one dispersion.