INDEPENDENT COMPONENT IMAGING

The present invention describes a partial independent component analysis (PICA) technique for blindly separating partially independent and/or gaussian-like sources from mixed observations over an informative index subspace, which allows various applications in independent component imaging. The present invention estimates a demixing matrix using only the independent and/or nongaussian portion of the observations. Specifically, rather than using all the data points which give rise to a large separation error, a subset of the data points is identified such that the partial source profiles defined over such a subset are statistically independent and/or nongaussian. The present invention describes a complete implementation of such a technique, whose steps and parameters may be achieved and estimated using an information theoretic-based neural computational algorithm. The present invention also demonstrates the principle of the approach on both controlled cases and real-world problems, and describes many extended applications of such a technique.