ICA method for speckle signals [blind source separation application]

Independent component analysis (ICA) has shown success in the separation of sources in lots of applications. Almost all of them assume that a set of recorded signals is the result of a linear mixture of independent sources. Although ICA methods were firstly designed to apply only to free-noise signals, numerous methods have extended it to deal with additive noise, using only higher order statistics. However, in speckle environment signals the noise is multiplicative, so the applicability of ICA is seriously reduced. This paper proposes an ICA method for speckle signals, taking into account the multiplicative nature of the noise and improving the results obtained by standard ICA methods.