Blind Separation of Heart Sound Convolutive Mixtures Utilizing Independent Vector Analysis

Separation of heart sound signals from the recorded mixtures has become a hot research topic in the clinical diagnosis of heart diseases. To better understand the current health status of patients, it is of great significance to develop intelligent auscultation methods to improve the effectiveness of hearing and assist clinicians in practice. In this paper, an optimization convolutive blind source separation algorithm utilizing independent vector analysis is proposed for separation of the heart sound mixtures. In the algorithm, a denoising approach is firstly used to reduce the impact of the additive white Gaussian noise. Then, using the short time Fourier transform, the mixing signals in time domain are transmitted into the frequency domain. Afterwards, the unmixng matrix is updated using Newton’s method, and the heart sound sources are reconstructed based on the estimated unmixing matrix. Experimental results show that the algorithm obtains better separation performance than the baseline methods. Especially, it has better superiority in the strong reverberant environment.