The\u00a0INTERSPEECH 2021<\/a>\u00a0Acoustic 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Please use\u00a0Microsoft Conference Management Toolkit\u00a0<\/a>for submitting the results. After logging in, complete the following steps to submit the results:<\/p>\n Submission deadline:<\/strong> March 15, 2021, 11:59pm (anywhere on Earth)<\/p>\n Contact us:<\/strong> For questions, please contact aec_challenge@microsoft.com<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n These Official Rules (\u201cRules\u201d) govern the operation of the Microsoft INTERSPEECH 2021 AEC (see overview) Event Contest (\u201cContest\u201d). Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA, 98052, USA, is the Contest sponsor (\u201cSponsor\u201d).<\/p>\n In these Rules, \u201cMicrosoft\u201d, \u201cwe\u201d, \u201cour\u201d, and \u201cus\u201d, refer to Sponsor and \u201cyou\u201d and \u201cyourself\u201d refers to a Contest participant, or the parent\/legal guardian of any Contest entrant who has not reached the age of majority to contractually obligate themselves in their legal place of residence. \u201cEvent\u201d refers to the INTERSPEECH 2021 AEC (see overview) event held in Toronto, Canada (the \u201cEvent\u201d). By entering you (your parent\/legal guardian if you are not the age of majority in your legal place of residence) agree to be bound by these Rules.<\/p>\n The Contest will operate from January 8, 2021 to March 22, 2021 (\u201cEntry Period\u201d). The Entry Period is divided into several periods as described in section How to Enter.<\/p>\n Open to any registered Event attendee 18 years of age or older. If you are 18 years of age or older but have not reached the age of majority in your legal place of residence, then you must have consent of a parent\/legal guardian. Employees and directors of Microsoft Corporation and its subsidiaries, affiliates, advertising agencies, and Contest Parties are not eligible, nor are persons involved in the execution or administration of this promotion, or the family members of each above (parents, children, siblings, spouse\/domestic partners, or individuals residing in the same household). Void in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, Region of Crimea, and where prohibited. For business\/tradeshow events: If you are attending the Event in your capacity as an employee, it is your sole responsibility to comply with your employer\u2019s gift policies. Microsoft will not be party to any disputes or actions related to this matter.<\/p>\n The Contest Objective is to promote collaborative research in real-time single-channel Speech Enhancement aimed to maximize the subjective (perceptual) quality of the enhanced speech. Winners will be determined based on the speech quality of AEC models using the online subjective evaluation framework ITU-T P.831. Only models described in accepted INTERSPEECH 2021 papers will be eligible for winning the Contest. See (yet to upload the paper) for additional Contest details. You may participate as an individual or a team. If forming a team, you must designate a \u201cTeam Captain\u201d who will submit all entry materials on behalf of the team. Once you register as part of a Team, you cannot change Teams or alter your current team (either by adding or removing members) after the submission of your Entry. Limit one Entry per person and per team. You may not compete on multiple teams and you may not enter individually and on a team. We are not responsible for Entries that we do not receive for any reason, or for Entries that we receive but are not decipherable or not functional for any reason. Each Team is solely responsible for its own cooperation and teamwork. In no event will Microsoft officiate in any dispute regarding the conduct or cooperation of any Team or its members. The Contest will operate as follows: Registration \/ Development Period: January 8 \u2013 March 8, 2021. To register, please send an email to\u00a0aec_challenge@microsoft.com<\/a> stating that you are interested to participate in the challenge. Please include the following details in your email:<\/p>\n Then, i. develop a speech enhancement model that best meets the Contest Objective as described more fully at (yet to be uploaded) and ii. submit a paper to INTERSPEECH 2021 which reports the computational complexity of the model in terms of the number of parameters and the time it takes to infer a frame on a particular CPU (preferably Intel Core i5 quad core machine clocked at 2.4 GHz). To develop your model, use any publicly available dataset for training data, including the Contest datasets provided for training and developing models. You may augment your datasets with the Contest dataset. You can augment your data in any way that improves the performance of your model. The final evaluation will be conducted on a blind test set that is similar to the open sourced test set. Testing \/ Entry Period: January 8 \u2013 March 22, 2021. On March 8, the blind test dataset will be made available. You will have until 11:59 PM PT on March 15 to test your model against this dataset and create a set of enhanced clips to submit for judging (your \u201cEntry\u201d). The rules of the challenge are as follows:<\/p>\n INTERSPEECH 2021 Paper Submission and Judging Period: March 22, 2021 \u2013 11:59 PM PT June 2, 2021 Your Entry must be described in a paper accepted by INTERSPEECH 2021. To submit a paper, visit https:\/\/www.interspeech2021.org\/. The entry limit is one per person during the Entry Period. Any attempt by any you to obtain more than the stated number of entries by using multiple\/different accounts, identities, registrations, logins, or any other methods will void your entries and you may be disqualified. Use of any automated system to participate is prohibited. We are not responsible for excess, lost, late, or incomplete entries. If disputed, entries will be deemed submitted by the \u201cauthorized account holder\u201d of the email address, social media account, or other method used to enter. The \u201cauthorized account holder\u201d is the natural person assigned to an email address by an internet or online service provider, or other organization responsible for assigning email addresses.<\/p>\n To be eligible, an entry must meet the following content\/technical requirements:<\/p>\n We are not claiming ownership rights to your Submission. However, by submitting an entry, you grant us an irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide right and license to use, review, assess, test and otherwise analyze your entry and all its content in connection with this Contest and use your entry in any media whatsoever now known or later invented for any non-commercial or commercial purpose, including, but not limited to, the marketing, sale or promotion of Microsoft products or services, without further permission from you. You will not receive any compensation or credit for use of your entry, other than what is described in these Official Rules. By entering you acknowledge that the we may have developed or commissioned materials similar or identical to your entry and you waive any claims resulting from any similarities to your entry. Further you understand that we will not restrict work assignments of representatives who have had access to your entry and you agree that use of information in our representatives\u2019 unaided memories in the development or deployment of our products or services does not create liability for us under this agreement or copyright or trade secret law. Your entry may be posted on a public website. We are not responsible for any unauthorized use of your entry by visitors to this website. We are not obligated to use your entry for any purpose, even if it has been selected as a winning entry.<\/p>\n Pending confirmation of eligibility, potential winners will be selected by Microsoft or their Agent or a qualified judging panel from among all eligible entries received based on the following judging criteria: 99% \u2013 The subjective speech quality evaluated on the blind test set using ITU-T P.808 framework. We will use the submitted clips with no alteration to conduct ITU-T P.808 subjective evaluation and pick the winners based on the results.\u00a0 See for additional Contest details. 1% \u2013 The Entry was described in an accepted INTERSPEECH 2021 paper. Winners will be selected within 7 days following the event. Winners will be notified within 7 days following the Event. In the event of a tie between any eligible entries, an additional judge will break the tie based on the judging criteria described above. The decisions of the judges are final and binding. If public vote determines winners, it is prohibited for any person to obtain votes by any fraudulent or inappropriate means, including offering prizes or other inducements in exchange for votes, automated programs or fraudulent ID\u2019s. Microsoft will void any questionable votes.<\/p>\n The odds of winning are based on the number and quality of eligible entries received.<\/p>\n To the extent allowed by law, by entering you agree to release and hold harmless Microsoft and its respective parents, partners, subsidiaries, affiliates, employees, and agents from any and all liability or any injury, loss, or damage of any kind arising in connection with this. All local laws apply. The decisions of Microsoft are final and binding. We reserve the right to cancel, change, or suspend this Contest for any reason, including cheating, technology failure, catastrophe, war, or any other unforeseen or unexpected event that affects the integrity of this Contest, whether human or mechanical. If the integrity of the Contest cannot be restored, we may select winners from among all eligible entries received before we had to cancel, change or suspend the Contest. If you attempt or we have strong reason to believe that you have compromised the integrity or the legitimate operation of this Contest by cheating, hacking, creating a bot or other automated program, or by committing fraud in any way, we may seek damages from you to the full extent of the law and you may be banned from participation in future Microsoft promotions.<\/p>\n This Contest will be governed by the laws of the State of Washington, and you consent to the exclusive jurisdiction and venue of the courts of the State of Washington for any disputes arising out of this Contest.<\/p>\n At Microsoft, we are committed to protecting your privacy. Microsoft uses the information you provide on this form to notify you of important information about our products, upgrades and enhancements, and to send you information about other Microsoft products and services. Microsoft will not share the information you provide with third parties without your permission except where necessary to complete the services or transactions you have requested, or as required by law. Microsoft is committed to protecting the security of your personal information. We use a variety of security technologies and procedures to help protect your personal information from unauthorized access, use, or disclosure. Your personal information is never shared outside the company without your permission, except under conditions explained above. If you believe that Microsoft has not adhered to this statement, please contact Microsoft by sending an email to\u00a0privrc@microsoft.com<\/a>\u00a0or postal mail to Microsoft Privacy Response Center, Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n This challenge is to benchmark the performance of real-time algorithms with a real (not simulated) test set. Participants will evaluate their acoustic echo canceller on a test set and submit the results (audio clips) for evaluation. The requirements for each acoustic echo canceller used for submission are:<\/p>\n Ross Cutler<\/a>, Microsoft Corp, USA The below table gives the accepted papers in order of performance rank. Note that the paper acceptance is not well correlated to performance. Paper acceptance was decided with the normal INTERSPEECH peer-review process.<\/p>\nSubmission instructions<\/h3>\n
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Official Rules<\/b><\/h2>\n
SPONSOR<\/h3>\n
DEFINITIONS<\/h3>\n
ENTRY PERIOD<\/h3>\n
ELIGIBILITY<\/h3>\n
HOW TO ENTER<\/h3>\n
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ELIGIBLE ENTRY<\/h3>\n
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USE OF ENTRIES<\/h3>\n
WINNER SELECTION AND NOTIFICATION<\/h3>\n
ODDS<\/h3>\n
GENERAL CONDITIONS AND RELEASE OF LIABILITY<\/h3>\n
GOVERNING LAW<\/h3>\n
PRIVACY<\/h3>\n
Timeline<\/h2>\n
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Organizers<\/h2>\n
\nAndo Saabas, Microsoft Corp, Estonia
\nTanel P\u00e4rnamaa, Microsoft Corp, Estonia
\nMarkus Loide, Microsoft Corp, Estonia
\nRobert Aichner<\/a>, Microsoft Corp, USA
\nSebastian Braun<\/a>, Microsoft Research, Germany
\nHannes Gamper<\/a>, Microsoft Research, USA
\nSriram Srinivasan, Microsoft Corp, USA
\nKarsten Sorensen, Microsoft Corp, USA<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\nRelated links<\/h2>\n
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Other challenges<\/h3>\n
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Final results<\/h3>\n
![\"Challenge](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/01\/results.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"table\"](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/01\/anova.png\")
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