  Non-negative blind source separation (BSS) has raised interest in various
fields of research, as testified by the wide literature on the topic of
non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). In this context, it is fundamental
that the sources to be estimated present some diversity in order to be
efficiently retrieved. Sparsity is known to enhance such contrast between the
sources while producing very robust approaches, especially to noise. In this
paper we introduce a new algorithm in order to tackle the blind separation of
non-negative sparse sources from noisy measurements. We first show that
sparsity and non-negativity constraints have to be carefully applied on the
sought-after solution. In fact, improperly constrained solutions are unlikely
to be stable and are therefore sub-optimal. The proposed algorithm, named nGMCA
(non-negative Generalized Morphological Component Analysis), makes use of
proximal calculus techniques to provide properly constrained solutions. The
performance of nGMCA compared to other state-of-the-art algorithms is
demonstrated by numerical experiments encompassing a wide variety of settings,
with negligible parameter tuning. In particular, nGMCA is shown to provide
robustness to noise and performs well on synthetic mixtures of real NMR
spectra.
