Blind Source Separation of Acoustic Mixtures with Distributed Microphones

The problem of blind source separation of acoustic mixtures is often addressed using independent component analysis in the frequency domain. One problem with this approach is the inconsistency across frequency in the permutation of the source estimates. Solutions to this problem have been proposed that exploit known properties of both the source signals and the mixing system, but require the microphones to be in a constrained geometry. In this paper a solution is presented that avoids this constraint by extracting information from the magnitude of the mixing system instead of its phase. The new method combines that information with information from the source estimates to provide a reliable permutation alignment.