Researchers Prove They Can Isolate Voices In A Crowd
Researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia are hoping computer programmers can help them with a solution to a decades-old "cocktail party" problem.
The researchers have found a mathematical solution that allows them to separate one sound from a recording of a noisy environment -- like a single voice from the din of conversation at a cocktail party. Mathematics professors Dan Casazza and Dan Edidin and Radu Balan, of Siemens Corporate Research, solved the problem and demonstrated that it is possible to isolate distinct voices and reconstruct spoken words.
"Our solution is called 'signal reconstruction without noisy phase,'" Edidin said. "In speech recognition technology, a 'signal' could be a recording of 25 people in a room talking at the same time. Our solution shows that we can pull out each voice individually, not just with the words, but with the voice characteristics of each individual. We showed that this 'cocktail party problem' is mathematically solvable."
