High-Fidelity Blind Separation of Acoustic Signals Using SIMO-Model-Based Independent Component Analysis

We newly propose a novel blind separation framework for Single-Input Multiple-Output (SIMO) -model-based acoustic signals using an extended ICA algorithm, SIMO-ICA. The SIMO-ICA consists of multiple ICAs and a fidelity controller, and each ICA runs in parallel under the fidelity control of the entire separation system. The SIMO-ICA can separate the mixed signals, not into monaural source signals but into SIMO-model-based signals from independent sources as they are at the microphones. Thus, the separated signals of SIMO-ICA can maintain the spatial qualities of each sound source. In order to evaluate its effectiveness, separation experiments are carried out under both nonreverberant and reverberant conditions. The experimental results reveal that the signal separation performance of the proposed SIMO-ICA is the same as that of the conventional ICA-based method, and that the spatial quality of the separated sound in SIMO-ICA is remarkably superior to that of the conventional method, particularly for the fidelity of the sound reproduction