We introduce the Energy-Based Blind Separating (EBS)

algorithm for extremely fast separation of mixed speech signals without loss of quality, which is performed in two stages: iterative-form separation and closed-form separation. This algorithm significantly improves the separation speed simply due to incorporating only some specific frequency bins into computations. Simulation results show that, on average, the proposed algorithm is 43 times faster than the independent component analysis (ICA) for speech signals, while preserving the separation quality. Also, it outperforms the fast independent component analysis (FastICA), the joint approximate diagonalization of eigenmatrices (JADE), and the second-order blind identifica tion (SOBI) algorithm in terms of separation quality