Independent component analysis with sinusoidal fourth-order contrasts

ABSTRACT The authors propose a new solution to the Independent Component Analysis (ICA) problem. In the two-dimensional case, we prove that under the whiteness constraint some fourth-order contrasts may be approximated by a sinusoid. Thus, the minimization of the contrast reduces to computing its phase. The novel approach, called SICA (Sinusoidal ICA), uses the ’Jacobi optimization’ to cope with higher dimensions. The method presented has a good performance along with a low computational cost. Some experiments with blind separation of audio and synthetic sources are included to compare the algorithm to other well-known approaches.