Blind separation of speech signals based on wavelet transform and independent component analysis

Abstract

Speech signals in frequency domain were separated based on discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and independent component analysis (ICA). First, mixed speech signals were decomposed into different frequency domains by DWT and the subbands of speech signals were separated using ICA in each wavelet domain; then, the permutation and scaling problems of frequency domain blind source separation (BSS) were solved by utilizing the correlation between adjacent bins in speech signals; at last, source signals were reconstructed from single branches. Experiments were carried out with 2 sources and 6 microphones using speech signals at sampling rate of 40 kHz. The microphones were aligned with 2 sources in front of them, on the left and right. The separation of one male and one female speeches lasted 2.5 s. It is proved that the new method is better than single ICA method and the signal to noise ratio is improved by 1 dB approximately.