Section: Application Domains
Audio Signal Separation in Reverberant Environments
Audio signal separation consists in extracting the individual sound of different instruments or speakers that were mixed on a recording. It is now successfully addressed in the academic setting of linear instantaneous mixtures. Yet, real-life recordings, generally associated to reverberant environments, remain an unsolved difficult challenge, especially with many sources and few audio channels. Much of the difficulty comes from the estimation of the unknown room impulse response associated to a matrix of mixing filters, which can be expressed as a dictionary-learning problem. Solutions to this problem have the potential to impact, for example, the music and game industry, through the development of new digital re-mastering techniques and virtual reality tools, but also surveillance and monitoring applications, where localizing audio sources is important.