  We discuss a technique that allows blind recovery of signals or blind
identification of mixtures in instances where such recovery or identification
were previously thought to be impossible: (i) closely located or highly
correlated sources in antenna array processing, (ii) highly correlated
spreading codes in CDMA radio communication, (iii) nearly dependent spectra in
fluorescent spectroscopy. This has important implications --- in the case of
antenna array processing, it allows for joint localization and extraction of
multiple sources from the measurement of a noisy mixture recorded on multiple
sensors in an entirely deterministic manner. In the case of CDMA, it allows the
possibility of having a number of users larger than the spreading gain. In the
case of fluorescent spectroscopy, it allows for detection of nearly identical
chemical constituents. The proposed technique involves the solution of a
bounded coherence low-rank multilinear approximation problem. We show that
bounded coherence allows us to establish existence and uniqueness of the
recovered solution. We will provide some statistical motivation for the
approximation problem and discuss greedy approximation bounds. To provide the
theoretical underpinnings for this technique, we develop a corresponding theory
of sparse separable decompositions of functions, including notions of rank and
nuclear norm that specialize to the usual ones for matrices and operators but
apply to also hypermatrices and tensors.
