Real-time Time-frequency Based Blind Source Separation

We present a real-time version of the DUET algorithm for the blind separation of any number of sources using only two mixtures. The method applies when sources are Wdisjoint orthogonal, that is, when the supports of the windowed Fourier transform of any two signals in the mixture are disjoint sets, an assumption which is justified in the Appendix. The online algorithm is a Maximum Likelihood (ML) based gradient search method that is used to track the mixing parameters. The estimates of the mixing parameters are then used to partition the time-frequency representation of the mixtures to recover the original sources. The technique is valid even in the case when the number of sources is larger than the number of mixtures. The method was tested on mixtures generated from different voices and noises recorded from varying angles in both anechoic and echoic rooms. In total, over 1500 mixtures were tested. The average SNR gain of the demixing was 15 dB for anechoic room mixtures and 5 dB for echoic office mixtures. The algorithm runs 5 times faster than real time on a 750MHz laptop computer. Sample sound files can be found here: http://www.princeton.edu/ ̃srickard/bss.html