Blind Speech Separation

We are surrounded by sounds. Such a noisy environment makes it di?cult to obtain desired speech and it is di?cult to converse comfortably there. This makes it important to be able to separate and extract a target speech signal from noisy observations for both man¿machine and human¿human communication. Blindsourceseparation(BSS)isanapproachforestimatingsourcesignals using only information about their mixtures observed in each input channel. The estimation is performed without possessing information on each source, such as its frequency characteristics and location, or on how the sources are mixed. The use of BSS in the development of comfortable acoustic com- nication channels between humans and machines is widely accepted. Some books have been published on BSS, independent component ana- sis (ICA), and related subjects. There, ICA-based BSS has been well studied in the statistics and information theory ?elds, for applications to a variety of disciplines including wireless communication and biomedicine. However, as speech and audio signal mixtures in a real reverberant environment are generally convolutive mixtures, they involve a structurally much more ch- lenging task than instantaneous mixtures, which are prevalent in many other applications.