Program dates: January 2021 – June 2021
The INTERSPEECH 2021 Acoustic Echo Cancellation Challenge is intended to stimulate research in the area of acoustic echo cancellation (AEC), which is an important part of speech enhancement and still a top issue in audio communication and conferencing systems. Many recent AEC studies report good performance on synthetic datasets where the training and testing data come from the same underlying distribution. However, the AEC performance often degrades significantly on real recordings. Also, most of the conventional objective metrics such as echo return loss enhancement (ERLE) and perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) do not correlate well with subjective speech quality tests in the presence of background noise and reverberation found in realistic environments.
In this challenge, we open source two large datasets to train AEC models under both single talk and double talk scenarios. These datasets consist of recordings from more than 5,000 real audio devices and human speakers in real environments, as well as a synthetic dataset. We also open source an online subjective test framework and provide an online objective metric service for researchers to quickly test their results. The winners of this challenge will be selected based on the average Mean Opinion Score (MOS) achieved across all different single talk and double talk scenarios.
Submission instructions
Please use Microsoft Conference Management Toolkit for submitting the results. After logging in, complete the following steps to submit the results:
- Choose “Create new submission” in the Author Console.
- Enter title, abstract and co-authors, and upload a lastname.txt file (can be empty or contain additional information regarding the submission).
- Compress the enhanced results files to a single lastname.zip file, retaining the same folder and file names as the blind test set (max file size: 350 MB).
- After creating the submission, return to the “Author Console” (by clicking on “Submissions” at the top of the page) and upload the lastname.zip file via “Upload Supplementary Material”.
Submission deadline: March 15, 2021, 11:59pm (anywhere on Earth)
Contact us: For questions, please contact aec_challenge@microsoft.com