Thesis: Mitch Parry PhD (2007), "Separation and Analysis of Multichannel Signals"

Mitch Parry (2007), Separation and Analysis of Multichannel Signals PhD Thesis [PDF], Georgia Institute of Techniology, College of Computing, Atlanta, GA. (Advisor: Irfan Essa)
Abstract
This thesis examines a large and growing class of digital signals that capture the combined effect of multiple underlying factors. In order to better understand these signals, we would like to separate and analyze the underlying factors independently. Although source separation applies to a wide variety of signals, this thesis focuses on separating individual instruments from a musical recording. In particular, we propose novel algorithms for separating instrument recordings given only their mixture. When the number of source signals does not exceed the number of mixture signals, we focus on a subclass of source separation algorithms based on joint diagonalization. Each approach leverages a different form of source structure. We introduce repetitive structure as an alternative that leverages unique repetition patterns in music and compare its performance against the other techniques.
When the number of source signals exceeds the number of mixtures (i.e., the underdetermined problem), we focus on spectrogram factorization techniques for source separation. We extend single-channel techniques to utilize the additional spatial information in multichannel recordings, and use phase information to improve the estimation of the underlying components.
via Separation and Analysis of Multichannel Signals.