Harmonic elimination using Independent Component Analysis

In the field of analysis and processing of weak signals, harmonics always disturb the weak signals and pose a serious problem for the amplitudes of the interferences are comparable to those of the signals. In this paper, independent component analysis (ICA) is used to remove harmonic interferences under the consideration that the original signals and the harmonic interferences are mutually independent. We introduced two additional channels of orthogonal zero-phase harmonic signals to instead of one unknown phase harmonic as two reference resources and combined the artificial signals with the measured signals to form a new data set as the input of ICA. After excluding those independent components related to harmonic interferences, the original signals were reconstructed. Experiment results for practical electroencephalographic (EEG) data show that ICA is a quite effective method for simultaneous elimination of multiple harmonic interferences.