Core Viewpoint - The article discusses the revolutionary advancements in the field of speech separation, particularly addressing the "cocktail party problem" through the development of deep neural networks (DNN) [2]. Group 1: Overview of Speech Separation - Speech separation has become crucial for enhancing speech clarity in complex acoustic environments and serves as a preprocessing method for other speech processing tasks [2]. - Researchers from various institutions conducted a comprehensive survey of over 200 representative papers, analyzing the latest research methods across multiple dimensions including deep learning methods, model architectures, evaluation metrics, datasets, and future challenges [2]. Group 2: Problem Definition - The authors categorize speech separation tasks into known and unknown speaker separation based on whether the number of speakers is fixed or variable, highlighting the challenges associated with each scenario [6]. - The need for dynamic output channel determination and the balance between separation quality and termination timing are emphasized as significant challenges in unknown speaker scenarios [6]. Group 3: Learning Paradigms - The article compares supervised and unsupervised learning methods, detailing the advantages and limitations of each approach in the context of speech separation [10]. - Supervised learning is currently the most mature paradigm, utilizing paired mixed audio and clean source audio for training, while unsupervised methods explore training models directly on unlabelled mixed audio [12]. Group 4: Model Architectures - The core components and evolution of speech separation models are summarized, including encoder, separation network, and decoder [14]. - Various architectures such as RNN-based, CNN-based, and transformer models are discussed, showcasing their strengths in capturing long-term dependencies and local feature extraction [17][18]. Group 5: Evaluation Metrics - A comprehensive evaluation metric system is necessary for assessing model performance, which includes both subjective and objective metrics [19]. - The article compares various metrics, highlighting the trade-offs between subjective evaluations that reflect human experience and objective metrics that are efficient but may focus on different aspects [20]. Group 6: Datasets - The article summarizes publicly available datasets for speech separation research, categorizing them based on single-channel and multi-channel formats [22]. - Understanding the coverage and difficulty of these datasets aids researchers in selecting appropriate datasets for algorithm evaluation and identifying gaps in current research [22]. Group 7: Performance Comparison - The authors present a comparison of different models' performance on standard datasets, illustrating the progress in speech separation technology over recent years [24]. - Notable improvements in performance metrics, such as SDR, are highlighted, with advanced architectures achieving SDR levels around 20 dB [24][25]. Group 8: Tools and Platforms - The article introduces various open-source tools and platforms that facilitate the development and application of speech separation tasks, comparing their functionalities and limitations [28]. - These tools provide convenient interfaces for researchers to replicate results and build prototype systems, accelerating the transition from research to application [28]. Group 9: Challenges and Future Directions - The article discusses current challenges in the field, including long-duration audio processing, mobile and embedded applications, real-time speech separation, and the rise of generative methods [32][33]. - The integration of pre-training techniques and the focus on target speaker extraction are also identified as key areas for future exploration [33].