Perceptually motivated blind source separation of convolutive mixtures

A perceptually motivated method is proposed for solving the permutation ambiguity of frequency-domain independent component analysis when the mixing environment is noisy and reverberant. In this method, perceptually irrelevant frequencies are removed from the speech spectrum using block based perceptual masking (simultaneous frequency masking) and then independent component analysis is applied. After source separation in frequency domain, a physical property of the mixing matrix, i.e., the coherency in adjacent frequencies, is utilized to solve the permutation ambiguity. From the simulation results it appears that the perceptual masking avoids the permutation problem.