Differential optical absorption spectroscopy (DOAS) is a powerful tool for detecting and quantifying trace gases in atmospheric chemistry\cite {Platt_Stutz08}. DOAS spectra consist of a linear combination of complex multi-peak multi-scale structures. Most DOAS analysis routines in use today are based on least squares techniques, for example, the approach developed in the 1970s uses polynomial fits to remove a slowly varying background, and known reference spectra to retrieve the identity and concentrations of reference gases. An open problem is to identify unknown gases in the fitting residuals for complex atmospheric mixtures.

We present a novel modification to the well-known infomax algorithm of blind source separation. Under natural gradient descent, the infomax algorithm converges to a stationary point of a limiting ordinary differential equation. However, due to the presence of saddle points or local minima of the corresponding likelihood function, the algorithm may be trapped around these bad stationary points for a long time, especially if the initial data are near them. To speed up convergence, we propose to add a sequence of random perturbations to the infomax algorithm to shake the iterating sequence so that it is captured by a path descending to a more stable stationary point. We analyze the convergence of the randomly perturbed algorithm, and illustrate its fast convergence through numerical examples on blind demixing of stochastic signals. The examples have analytical structures so that saddle points or local minima of

Blind source separation (BSS) methods are useful tools to recover or enhance individual speech sources from their mixtures in a multi-talker environment. A class of efficient BSS methods are based on the mutual exclusion hypothesis of the source signal Fourier spectra on the timefrequency (TF) domain, and subsequent data clustering and classification. Though such methodology is simple, the discontinuous decisions in the TF domain for classification often cause defects in the recovered signals in the time domain. The defects are perceived as unpleasant ringing sounds, the so called musical noise. Post-processing is desired for further quality enhancement. In this paper, an efficient musical noise reduction method is presented based on a convex model of time-domain sparse filters. The sparse filters are intended to cancel out the interference due to major sparse peaks in the mixing coefficients or physically the early arrival and high energy portion of the room impulse responses. This strategy is efficiently carried out by l1 regularization and the split Bregman method. Evaluations by both synthetic and room recorded speech and music data show that our method outperforms existing musical noise reduction methods in terms of objective and subjective measures. Our method can be used as a post-processing tool for more general and recent versions of TF domain BSS methods as well.

In this paper, we study the problem of computing the effective diffusivity for a particle moving in chaotic and stochastic flows. In addition, we numerically investigate the residual diffusion phenomenon in chaotic advection. The residual diffusion refers to the nonzero effective (homogenized) diffusion in the limit of zero molecular diffusion as a result of chaotic mixing of the streamlines. In this limit, traditional numerical methods typically fail since the solutions of the advection-diffusion equations develop sharp gradients. Instead of solving the Fokker--Planck equation in the Eulerian formulation, we compute the motion of particles in the Lagrangian formulation, which is modeled by stochastic differential equations (SDEs). We propose an effective numerical integrator based on a splitting method to solve the corresponding SDEs in which the deterministic subproblem is symplectic preserving while the random subproblem

We study front speeds of curvature and strain G-equations arising in turbulent combustion. These G-equations are HamiltonJacobi type level set partial differential equations (PDEs) with non-coercive Hamiltonians and degenerate nonlinear second order diffusion. The Hamiltonian of a strain G-equation is also non-convex. Numerical computation is performed based on monotone discretization and weighted essentially nonoscillatory (WENO) approximation of transformed G-equations on a fixed periodic domain. The advection field in the computation is a two dimensional Hamiltonian flow consisting of a periodic array of counter-rotating vortices, or cellular flows. Depending on whether the evolution is predominantly in the hyperbolic or parabolic regimes, suitable explicit and semi-implicit time stepping methods are chosen. The turbulent flame speeds are computed as the linear growth rates of large time solutions. A