Cocktail Party Problem: Source Separation Issues and Computational Methods

The concept of the cocktail party problem (CPP) was coined by Cherry (1953). It was proposed to address the phenomenon associated with human auditory system that, in a cocktail party environment, humans have the ability to focus their listening attention on a single speaker when multiple conversations and background interferences and noise are presented simultaneously. Many researchers and scientists from a variety of research areas attempt to tackle this problem (Bregman, 1990; Arons, 1992; Yost, 1997; Feng et al., 2000; Bronkhorst, 2000). Despite of all these works, the CPP remains an open problem and demands further research effort. Figure 1 illustrates the cocktail party effect using a simplified scenario with two simultaneous conversations in the room environment. As the solution to the CPP offers many practical applications, engineers and scientists have spent their efforts in understanding the mechanism of the human auditory system, and hoping to design a machine which can work similarly to the human abStract