A multimodal solution to blind source separation of moving sources

A novel multimodal solution is proposed to solve the problem of blind source separation (BSS) of moving sources. Since for moving sources the mixing filters are time varying, therefore, the unmixing filters should also be time varying and can be difficult to track in real time. In this solution the visual modality is utilized to facilitate the separation of moving sources. The movement of the sources is detected by a relatively simplistic 3-D tracker based on video cameras. The tracking process is based on particle filtering which provides robust tracking performance. Positions and velocities of the sources are obtained from the 3-D tracker and if the sources are moving, a beamforming algorithm is used to perform real time speech enhancement and provide separation of the sources. Experimental results show that by utilizing the visual modality, a good BSS performance for moving sources in a low reverberant environment can be achieved. © 2011, IGI Global