The signal separation evaluation campaign (2007-2010)

We present the outcomes of three recent evaluation campaigns in the field of audio and biomedical source separation. These campaigns have witnessed a boom in the range of applications of source separation systems in the last few years, as shown by the increasing number of datasets from 1 to 9 and the increasing number of submissions from 15 to 34. We first discuss their impact on the definition of a reference evaluation methodology, together with shared datasets and software. We then present the key results obtained over almost all datasets. We conclude by proposing directions for future research and evaluation, based in particular on the ideas raised during the related panel discussion at the Ninth International Conference on Latent Variable Analysis and Signal Separation (LVA/ICA 2010).