Blind Signal Processing (BSP) is an emerging area of research and technology with solid theoretical foundations and many potential applications. The problems of separating or extracting of the source signals from sensor arrays, without knowledge of the transmission channel characteristics and the real sources, can be expressed briefly as a number of blind source separation (BSS) or related generalized component analysis (GCA) methods: Independent Component Analysis (ICA) (and its extensions), Sparse Component Analysis (SCA), Sparse Principal Component Analysis (SPCA), Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), Time-Frequency Component Analyzer (TFCA) and Multichannel Blind Deconvolution (MBD). BSP is not limited to ICA or BSS. With BSP we aim to discover and validate principles or laws which govern relationships between inputs (hidden components) and outputs (observations) when the information about the propagation Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) system and its inputs are limited or hindered. BSP incorporates many problems, like blind identification of channels of unknown systems or a problem of suitable decomposition of signals into basic latent (hidden) components which do not necessary represent true sources but rather some of their features or sub-components.
This four-hour course presents the fundamentals of blind signal processing, especially blind source separation and extraction, and in the remaining time discusses their applications in several important signal processing areas including estimation of sources, novel enhancement, denoising, artifact removal, filtering, detection, classification of multi-sensory signals and data, especially in biomedical applications and Brain Computer Interface (BCI).