On the Use of Spatial Time Frequency Distributions for Signal Extraction

This paper deals with the extraction of signals from their instantaneous linear mixtures using time-frequency distributions. Fundamentally, this problem is a signal synthesis from the time-frequency (t-f) plane. However with the incorporation of the spatial information provided by a multisensor array, the problem can be posed as special case of blind source separation. So far, the blind source separation has been solved using only statistical information available on the source signals. Herein, we propose to solve the aforementioned problem using time-frequency signal representations and the spatial array aperture. The proposed approach relies on the difference in the t-f signatures of the sources to be separated. It is based on the diagonalization of a combined set of spatial time-frequency distribution matrices. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of our method.