Underdetermined blind source separation of speech mixtures based on K-means clustering

Underdetermined blind source separation is to recover the source signals from the observed signals without prior knowledge of the mixing channel. In signal processing, it is an open problem attracted the attention of more and more researchers. In this paper, we presents a fast and effective time-frequency algorithm to separate speech source signals in the underdetermined mixture case. In the proposed algorithm, the time-domain mixture signals are transformed to the frequency-domain by using short-time Fourier transform (STFT). Then the mixing matrix is estimated using K-means clustering, and frequency-domain sources are separated by solving a low-dimensional linear programming problem based on the estimated mixing matrix. Finally, the time-domain source signals are obtained using inverse STFT. The proposed algorithm has two advantages, one is to save time consumption, the other is to obtain better separation performance. Experimental results based on two mixtures of four speech sources demonstrate the feasibility and superiority of the proposed algorithm.