Blind separation of impulsive alpha-stable sources using minimum dispersion criterion

Abstract

This letter introduces a novel blind source separation (BSS) approach for extracting impulsive signals from their observed mixtures. The impulsive signals are modeled as real-valued symmetric alpha-stable (S/spl alpha/S) processes characterized by infinite second- and higher-order moments. The proposed approach uses the minimum dispersion (MD) criterion as a measure of sparseness and independence of the data. A new whitening procedure by a normalized covariance matrix is introduced. We show that the proposed method is robust, so-named for the property of being insensitive to possible variations in the underlying form of sampling distribution. Algorithm derivation and simulation results are provided to illustrate the good performance of the proposed approach. The new method has been compared with three of the most popular BSS algorithms: JADE, EASI, and restricted quasi-maximum likelihood (RQML).