The Histogram Test method is a popular technique in analog-to-digital converter (ADC) testing. The presence of additive noise in the test setup or in the ADC itself can potentially affect the accuracy of the test results. In this study, we demonstrate that additive noise causes a bias in the terminal based estimation of the gain but not in the estimation of the offset. The estimation error is determined analytically as a function of the sinusoidal stimulus signal amplitude and the noise standard deviation. We derive an exact but computationally difficult expression as well as a simpler closed form approximation that provides an upper bound of the bias of the terminal based gain. The estimators are validated numerically using a Monte Carlo procedure with simulated and experimental data.

Independent Component Analysis (ICA) can be used for single channel audio separation, if a mixed signal is transformed into time-frequency domain and the resulting matrix of magnitude coefficients is processed by ICA. Previous works used only frequency (spectral) vectors and Kullback-Leibler distance measure for this task. New decomposition bases are proposed: time vectors and time-frequency components. The applicability of several different measures of distance of components are analysed. An algorithm for clustering of components is presented. It was tested on mixes of two and three sounds. The perceptual quality of separation obtained with the measures of distance proposed was evaluated by listening tests, indicating "beta" and "correlation" measures as the most appropriate. The "Euclidean" distance is shown to be appropriate for sounds with varying amplitudes. The perceptual effect of the amount of variance used was also evaluated.