Experimental upper bound for the performance of convolutive source separation methods

An important problem in the field of blind source separation (BSS) of real convolutive mixtures is the determination of the role of the demixing filter structure and the criterion/optimization method in limiting separation performance. This issue requires the knowledge of the optimal performance for a given structure, which is unknown for real mixtures. Herein, the authors introduce an experimental upper bound on the separation performance for a class of convolutive blind source separation structures, which can be used to approximate the optimal performance. As opposed to a theoretical upper bound, the experimental upper bound produces an estimate of the optimal separating parameters for each dataset in addition to specifying an upper bound on separation performance. Estimation of the upper bound involves the application of a supervised learning method to the set of observations found by recording the sources one at a time. Using the upper bound, it is demonstrated that structures other than the finite-impulse-response (FIR) structure should be considered for real (convolutive) mixtures, there is still much room for improvement in current convolutive BSS algorithms, and the separation performance of these algorithms is not necessarily limited by local minima.