While crucial to many important audio-focused technologies and applications, enhancing speech is a difficult task with no one-size-fits-all solution. A new data challenge invites researchers and scientists to tackle this ill-posed inverse problem with real-world data sets.
Speech enhancement encompasses processes like denoising and defiltering to improve speech quality and intelligibility by reducing noise and filtering from recorded speech signals. This task is crucial in fields such as telecommunications, hearing aids, and automated speech recognition systems, where background conditions can significantly impair the signal.
Enhancement of speech is a challenging task because it is an ill-posed inverse problem, meaning there is no unique solution and small changes in the input can result in large variations in the output. The difficulty lies in accurately distinguishing between the speech, noise, and filtering components, especially when they overlap in frequency and time. Also, the characteristics of the noise can vary widely, requiring more adaptive and robust enhancement techniques. Additionally, the enhancement process should preserve the naturalness and intelligibility of the speech while removing the noise and filtering, which is a delicate balance to achieve.
The Helsinki Speech Challenge 2024 (HSC2024) invites researchers and scientists to test their speech enhancement and audio deconvolution algorithms on our real-world data sets, consisting of paired clean and corrupted audio samples affected by our recording setup. The challenge is to develop innovative methods to effectively recover a clean audio signal. The winners will be invited to present their results at this year’s Inverse Days, 10 – 13 December, 2024, in Oulu, Finland.
HSC2024 bridges the gap between inverse problems, with roots in abstract and applied mathematics, and speech enhancement, which in recent years has relied heavily on machine learning. The challenge is co-organised by the University of Helsinki, Finnish Inverse Problems Society, and FAME Flagship of Advanced Mathematics for Sensing, Imaging and Modelling. The organisers hope that the provided data will be useful for research in the fields of speech enhancement and inverse problems beyond this challenge.
For more information and registration, please visit the challenge’s official website: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/helsinki-speech-challenge/
Note! The registration deadline for HSC2024 is 1 September, 2024.
