Blind separation of non-stationary sources using continuous density hidden Markov models

摘要

Blind source separation (BSS) has attained much attention in signal processing society due to its 'blind' property and wide applications. However, there are still some open problems, such as underdetermined BSS, noise BSS. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian approach to improve the separation performance of instantaneous mixtures with non-stationary sources by taking into account the internal organization of the non-stationary sources. Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is used to model the distribution of source signals and the continuous density hidden Markov model (CDHMM) is derived to track the non-stationarity inside the source signals. Source signals can switch between several states such that the separation performance can be significantly improved. An expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is derived to estimate the mixing coefficients, the CDHMM parameters and the noise covariance. The source signals are recovered via maximum a posteriori (MAP) approach. To ensure the convergence of the proposed algorithm, the proper prior densities, conjugate prior densities, are assigned to estimation coefficients for incorporating the prior information. The initialization scheme for the estimates is also discussed. Systematic simulations are used to illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has more robust separation performance in terms of similarity score in noise environments in comparison with the classical BSS algorithms in determined mixture case. Additionally, since the mixing matrix and the sources are estimated jointly, the proposed EM algorithm also works well in underdetermined case. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm converges quickly with proper initialization.