Source separation in post-nonlinear mixtures

We address the problem of separation of mutually independent sources in nonlinear mixtures. First, we propose theoretical results and prove that in the general case, it is not possible to separate the sources without nonlinear distortion. Therefore, we focus our work on specific nonlinear mixtures known as post-nonlinear mixtures. These mixtures constituted by a linear instantaneous mixture (linear memoryless channel) followed by an unknown and invertible memoryless nonlinear distortion, are realistic models in many situations and emphasize interesting properties i.e., in such nonlinear mixtures, sources can be estimated with the same indeterminacies as in instantaneous linear mixtures. The separation structure of nonlinear mixtures is a two-stage system, namely, a nonlinear stage followed by a linear stage, the parameters of which are updated to minimize an output independence criterion expressed as a mutual information criterion. The minimization of this criterion requires knowledge or estimation of source densities or of their log-derivatives. A first algorithm based on a Gram-Charlier expansion of densities is proposed. Unfortunately, it fails for hard nonlinear mixtures. A second algorithm based on an adaptive estimation of the log-derivative of densities leads to very good performance, even with hard nonlinearities. Experiments are proposed to illustrate these results.