On the robustness of the multidimensional state coherence transform for solving the permutation problem of frequency-domain ICA

A common problem in frequency domain independent component analysis (ICA) is the so called permutation problem which arises due to the independent demixing in each frequency bin. This paper evaluates the robustness of a an extension of a recently proposed method for permutation correction based on the time difference of arrival (TDOA) of the sources. First, we discuss the permutation problem, review the proposed method, and give an intuitive model to predict the number of permutations. Then the theoretical performance using perfect knowledge of the TDOAs of the sources as well as the practical performance using the TDOAs estimated from a multidimensional state coherence transform (SCT) are evaluated through extensive simulations. In our experiments, ICA with SCT based permutation correction outperforms Independent Vector Analysis (IVA).