A novel method to resolve the permutation ambiguity problem in convolutive blind separation of nonstationary acoustic sources

In this paper, we propose a frequency-domain approach for convolutive blind separation of nonstationary acoustic sources (ConvBSS). We focus on the challenging problem of permutation ambiguity correction and introduce a new method using spectrum characterization of acoustic signals. The proposed approach involves the computation of the harmonic product spectrum (HPS) to take advantage of the sourcespsila time-frequency representation. The permutation ambiguity problem is then resolved by searching the permutation that maximizes the HPS-based correlation between the constructed harmonic spectrum and the estimated one at each resolution step. We demonstrate through experiment simulations that the ConvBSS is achieved in real environments.