Blind separation of convolutive mixtures based on second order and third order statistics

This paper addresses the problem of blind separation of linear convolutive mixtures. We first reformulate the problem into a blind separation of linear instantaneous mixtures, and then a statistical approach is applied to solve the reformulated problem. From the statistics of the mixtures, two kinds of matrix pencils are constructed to estimate the mixing matrix. The original sources are then separated with the estimated mixing matrix. For the purpose of computational efficiency and robustness, in the matrix pencil, one matrix is constructed from the second order statistics, and the other is constructed from the third order statistics. The proposed novel methods do not require the exact knowledge of the channel order. Simulation results show that the methods are robust and have good performance.