Blind separation of sparse sources in the presence of outliers

Abstract

Blind Source Separation (BSS) plays a key role to analyze multichannel data since it aims at recovering unknown underlying elementary sources from observed linear mixtures in an unsupervised way. In a large number of applications, multichannel measurements contain corrupted entries, which are highly detrimental for most BSS techniques. In this article, we introduce a new robust BSS technique coined robust Adaptive Morphological Component Analysis (rAMCA). Based on sparse signal modeling, it makes profit of an alternate reweighting minimization technique that yields a robust estimation of the sources and the mixing matrix simultaneously with the removal of the spurious outliers. Numerical experiments are provided that illustrate the robustness of this new algorithm with respect to aberrant outliers on a wide range of blind separation instances. In contrast to current robust BSS methods, the rAMCA algorithm is shown to perform very well when the number of observations is close or equal to the number of sources.