A New Method for Solving the Permutation Problem of Frequency-Domain Blind Source Separation

Frequency domain blind source separation has the great advantage that the complicated convolution in time domain becomes multiple efficient multiplications in frequency domain. However, the inherent ambiguity of permutation of ICA becomes an important problem that the separated signals at different frequencies may be permuted in order. Mapping the separated signal at each frequency to a target source remains to be a difficult problem. In this paper, we first discuss the inter-frequency correlation based method [1], and propose a new method using the continuity in power between adjacent frequency components of same source. The proposed method also implicitly utilizes the information of inter-frequency correlation, as such has better performance than the previous method. key words: blind source separation, ICA, permutation, inter-frequency similarity