  Speech separation is the task of separating target speech from background
interference. Traditionally, speech separation is studied as a signal
processing problem. A more recent approach formulates speech separation as a
supervised learning problem, where the discriminative patterns of speech,
speakers, and background noise are learned from training data. Over the past
decade, many supervised separation algorithms have been put forward. In
particular, the recent introduction of deep learning to supervised speech
separation has dramatically accelerated progress and boosted separation
performance. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the research on
deep learning based supervised speech separation in the last several years. We
first introduce the background of speech separation and the formulation of
supervised separation. Then we discuss three main components of supervised
separation: learning machines, training targets, and acoustic features. Much of
the overview is on separation algorithms where we review monaural methods,
including speech enhancement (speech-nonspeech separation), speaker separation
(multi-talker separation), and speech dereverberation, as well as
multi-microphone techniques. The important issue of generalization, unique to
supervised learning, is discussed. This overview provides a historical
perspective on how advances are made. In addition, we discuss a number of
conceptual issues, including what constitutes the target source.
