Patent ID: 8014536

Claim:
A method for separating signals from multiple audio sources, the method comprising: a) emitting L source signals from L audio sources disposed in a common acoustic environment, wherein L is an integer greater than one; b) disposing L audio detectors in the common acoustic environment; c) receiving L sensor signals at the L audio detectors, wherein each sensor signal is a convolutive mixture of the L source signals; d) providing D≧L frequency-domain probabilistic source models, wherein each source model comprises a sum of one or more source model components, and wherein each source model component comprises a prior probability and a probability distribution having one or more frequency components, whereby the D probabilistic source models form a set of D audio dictionaries; e) selecting L of the audio dictionaries to provide a one-to-one correspondence between the L selected audio dictionaries and the L audio sources; f) inferring an unmixing and deconvolutive transformation G from the L sensor signals and the L selected audio dictionaries by maximizing a likelihood of observing the L sensor signals; g) recovering one or more frequency-domain source signal estimates by applying the inferred unmixing transformation G to the L sensor signals; h) recovering one or more time-domain source signal estimates from the frequency-domain source signal estimates.