A robust approach to the permutation problem of frequency-domain blind source separation

This paper presents a robust and precise method for solving the permutation problem of frequency-domain blind source separation. It is based on two previous approaches: the direction of arrival estimation approach and the inter-frequency correlation approach. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches, and integrate them to exploit the both advantages. We also present a closed form formula to calculate a null direction, which is used in estimating the directions of source signals. Experimental results show that our method solved permutation problems almost perfectly for a situation that two sources were mixed in a room whose reverberation time was 300 ms.