Blind separation of real world audio signals using overdetermined mixtures

Alex Westner and V. Michael Bove, Jr.
MIT Media Laboratory
Proc. ICA '99, January 1999

We discuss the advantages of using overdetermined mixtures to improve upon blind source separation algorithms that are designed to extract sound sources from acoustic mixtures. A study of the nature of room impulse responses helps us choose an adaptive filter architecture. We use ideal inverses of acquired room impulse responses to compare the effectiveness of different-sized separating filter configurations of various filter lengths. Using a multi-channel blind least-mean-square algorithm (MBLMS), we show that, by adding additional sensors, we can improve upon the separation of signals mixed with real world filters.