Blind speech separation based on undecimated wavelet packet-perceptual filterbanks and independent component analysis

Abstract: In this paper, we address the problem of blind separation of speech mixtures. We propose a new blind speech separation system, which integrates a perceptual filterbank and independent component analysis (ICA) and using kurtosis criterion. The perceptual filterbank was designed by adjusting undecimated wavelet packet decomposition (UWPD) tree in order to accord to critical band characteristics of psycho-acoustic model. Our proposed technique consists on transforming the observations signals into an adequate representation using UWPD and Kurtosis maximization criterion in a new preprocessing step in order to increase the non-Gaussianity which is a pre-requirement for ICA. Experiments were carried out with the instantaneous mixture of two speech sources using two sensors. The obtained results show that the proposed method gives a considerable improvement when compared with FastICA and other techniques.