Under-determined source separation: Comparison of two approaches based on sparse decompositions

Abstract

This paper focuses on under-determined source separation when the mixing parameters are known. The approach is based on a sparse decomposition of the mixture. In the proposed method, the mixture is decomposed with Matching Pursuit by introducing a new class of multi-channel dictionaries, where the atoms are given by a spatial direction and a waveform. The knowledge of the mixing matrix is directly integrated in the decomposition. Compared to the separation by multi-channel Matching Pursuit followed by a clustering, the new algorithm introduces less artifacts whereas the level of residual interferences is about the same. These two methods are compared to Bofill & Zibulevsky's separation algorithm and DUET method. We also study the effect of smoothing the decompositions and the importance of the quality of the estimation of the mixing matrix. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.