Underdetermined blind separation of nondisjoint sources in the time-frequency domain

This paper considers the blind separation of nonstationary sources in the underdetermined case, when there are more sources than sensors. A general framework for this problem is to work on sources that are sparse in some signal representation domain.. Recently, two methods have been proposed with respect to the time-frequency (TF) domain. The first uses quadratic time-frequency distributions (TFDs) and a clustering approach, and the second uses a linear TFD. Both of these methods assume that the sources are disjoint in the TF domain; i.e., there is, at most, one source present at a point in the TF domain. In this paper, we relax this assumption by allowing the sources to be TF-nondisjoint to a certain extent. In particular, the number of sources present at a point is strictly less than the number of sensors. The separation can still be achieved due to subspace projection that allows us to identify the sources present and to estimate their corresponding TFD values. In particular, we propose two subspace-based algorithms for TF-nondisjoint sources: one uses quadratic TFDs and the other a linear TFD. Another contribution of this paper is a new estimation procedure for the mixing matrix. Finally, then numerical performance of the proposed methods are provided highlighting their performance gain compared to existing ones.