  A blind source separation method is described to extract sources from data
mixtures where the underlying sources are assumed to be sparse and
uncorrelated. The approach used is to detect and analyse segments of time where
one source exists on its own. Information from these segments is combined to
counteract the effects of noise and small random correlations between the
sources that would occur in practice. This combined information can then be
used to estimate the sources one at a time using a deflationary method.
Probability density functions are not assumed for any of the sources. A
comparison is made between the proposed method, the Minimum Heading Change
method, Fast-ICA and Clusterwise PCA. It is shown, for the dataset used in this
paper, that the proposed method has the best performance for clean signals if
the input parameters are chosen correctly. However the performance of this
method can be very sensitive to these input parameters and can also be more
sensitive to noise than the Fast-ICA and Clusterwise methods.
