Assignment problem-based approach for solving permutation ambiguity in frequency domain convolutive source separation

In this paper, we propose an effective method for blind source separation of convolutive mixtures in the frequency domain. The main difficulty in a frequency approach is the permutation problem. In the proposed method, we use the Assignment Problem (AP) approach to solve permutation ambiguity in the frequency domain. In our work, we apply different algorithms to solve the AP to find the optimal solution. Furthermore, by using a simple check procedure, the algorithm has to only solve the permutation problem in a few frequency bins instead of all. This method has been proven more efficient on computation than the previous methods using the AP approach. Computer simulation experiments with speech data are presented to illustrate the proposed method.