A variational Bayes approach to the underdetermined blind source separation with automatic determination of the number of sources

In this paper, we propose a variational Bayes approach to the underdetermined blind source separation and show how a variational treatment can open up the possibility of determining the actual number of sources. The procedure is performed in a frequency bin-wise manner. In every frequency bin, we model the time-frequency mixture by a variational mixture of Gaussians with a circular-symmetric complex-Gaussian density function. In the Bayesian inference, we consider appropriate conjugate prior distributions for modeling the parameters of this distribution. The learning task consists of estimating the hyper-parameters characterizing the parameter distributions for the optimization of the variational posterior distribution. The proposed approach requires no prior knowledge on the number of sources in a mixture.