30+ Years of Source Separation Research: Achievements and Future Challenges

TL;DR

This paper reviews over 30 years of source separation research in speech, audio, and music, highlighting key achievements, evaluation efforts, and future challenges in the field.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the major advancements, evaluation practices, and future directions in source separation research over three decades.

Findings

Significant progress in single- and multi-channel source separation techniques.

Development of standardized evaluation metrics and datasets.

Identification of key future research challenges.

Abstract

Source separation (SS) of acoustic signals is a research field that emerged in the mid-1990s and has flourished ever since. On the occasion of ICASSP's 50th anniversary, we review the major contributions and advancements in the past three decades in the speech, audio, and music SS research field. We will cover both single- and multi-channel SS approaches. We will also look back on key efforts to foster a culture of scientific evaluation in the research field, including challenges, performance metrics, and datasets. We will conclude by discussing current trends and future research directions.