Handbook of Blind Source Separation

Chapter 1

Introduction

C. Jutten and P. Comon

Blind techniques were born in the 1980s, when the first adaptive equalizers were designed for digital communications [67,33,10,28]. The problem was to compensate for the effects of an unknown linear single input single output (SISO) stationary channel, without knowing the input.

The scientific community used the word “blind” for denoting all identification or inversion methods based on output observations only. In fact, blind techniques in digital communications aimed at working when the “eye¹ was closed”; hence the terminology.

At the beginning, the word “unsupervised” was sometimes used (for instance in French the wording autodidacte), but it seems now better to be consistent with the worldwide terminology, ...