Source separation

Patent Pending Source separation problems in digital signal processing are those in which several signals have been mixed together into a combined signal and the objective is to recover the original component signals from the combined signal. The classical example of a source separation problem is the "cocktail party problem", where a number of people are talking simultaneously in a room (for example, at a cocktail party), and a listener is trying to follow one of the discussions. The human brain can handle this sort of auditory source separation problem, but it is a difficult problem in digital signal processing. This was first analyzed by Colin Cherry.