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Data Challenges

(with available data challenges)
Current Challenges


Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing

2023

Verbal communication in noisy environments can be hard. Speech enhancement using head-worn microphone arrays, such as hearing aids or augmented reality devices offers the opportunity to make it easier. However, the highly dynamic nature of the listening situation presents some challenges.



Speech and Language Processing

2023

Verbal communication in noisy environments can be hard. Speech enhancement using head-worn microphone arrays, such as hearing aids or augmented reality devices offers the opportunity to make it easier. However, the highly dynamic nature of the listening situation presents some challenges.

Past Challenges


Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing

2022

Associated SPS Event: IEEE ICASSP 2022 Grand Challenge

The ICASSP 2022 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. 

Associated SPS Event: IEEE ICASSP 2022 Grand Challenge

Over the last few years, the technology of speech synthesis and voice conversion has made significant improvement with the development of deep learning. The models can generate realistic and human-like speech. It is difficult for most people to distinguish the generated audio from the real. However, this technology also poses a great threat to the global political economy and social stability if some attackers and criminals misuse it with the intent to cause harm. 

Listening in noisy reverberant environments can be challenging. The recent emergence of hearable devices, such as smart headphones, smart glasses and virtual/augmented reality headsets, presents an opportunity for a new class of speech and acoustic signal processing algorithms which use multimodal sensor data to compensate for, or even exploit, changes in head orientation. 

Associated SPS Event: IEEE ICASSP 2022 Grand Challenge

Noise suppression has become more important than ever before due to the increasing use of voice interfaces for various applications. Given the millions of internet-connected devices being employed for audio/video calls, noise suppression is expected to be effective for all noise types chosen from daily-life scenarios.

Associated SPS Event: IEEE ICASSP 2022 Grand Challenge

The L3DAS22 Challenge aims at encouraging and fostering research on machine learning for 3D audio signal processing. 3D audio is gaining increasing interest in the machine learning community in recent years. The range of applications is incredibly wide, extending from virtual and real conferencing to autonomous driving, surveillance and many more.

2021

Associated SPS Event: IEEE ICASSP 2021 Grand Challenge

The ICASSP 2021 Deep Noise Suppression (DNS) challenge is designed to foster innovation in the field of noise suppression to achieve superior perceptual speech quality. We recently organized a DNS challenge special session at INTERSPEECH 2020. We open sourced training and test datasets for researchers to train their noise suppression models. We also open sourced a subjective evaluation framework and used the tool to evaluate and pick the final winners. Many researchers from academia and industry made significant contributions to push the field forward.

Associated SPS Event: IEEE ICASSP 2021 Grand Challenge

The ICASSP 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 train and test samples come from the same underlying distribution.

Associated SPS Event: IEEE ICASSP 2021 Grand Challenge

Text-to-speech (TTS) or speech synthesis has witnessed significant performance improvement with the help of deep learning. The latest advances in end-to-end text-to-speech paradigm and neural vocoder have enabled us to produce very realistic and natural-sounding synthetic speech reaching almost human-parity performance. But this amazing ability is still limited to the ideal scenarios with a large single-speaker less-expressive training set.

2019

The Interspeech 2019 Computational Paralinguistics ChallengE (ComParE) is an open Challenge dealing with states and traits of speakers as manifested in their speech signal’s properties.

DIHARD II is the second in a series of diarization challenges focusing on "hard" diarization; that is, speaker diarization for challenging recordings where there is an expectation that the current state-of-the-art will fare poorly.

2018

The IEEE AASP Challenge on acoustic source LOCalization And TrAcking (LOCATA) aims at providing researchers in source localization and tracking with a framework to objectively benchmark results against competing algorithms using a common, publicly released data corpus that encompasses a range of realistic scenarios in an enclosed acoustic environment. Data corresponding to the LOCATA challenge

2017

The IEEE Signal Processing Society announced the fourth edition of the Signal Processing Cup: a real-time beat tracking challenge. The beat is a salient periodicity in a music signal. It provides a fundamental unit of time and foundation for the temporal structure of the music. As Meinard Müller says (Fundamentals of Music Processing, Springer, 2015), “It is the beat that drives music forward and provides the temporal framework of a piece of music. Intuitively, the beat corresponds to the pulse a human taps along when listening to music.”

2016

The workshop aims to provide a venue for researchers working on computational analysis of sound events and scene analysis to present and discuss their results. We aim to bring together researchers from many different universities and companies with interest in the topic, and provide the opportunity for scientific exchange of ideas and opinions. The workshop is organized as a satellite event to the 2016 European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO).

2014

The ACE Challenge was part of the programme of Challenges organised by the IEEE Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee. The aim of this challenge was to evaluate state-of-the-art algorithms for blind acoustic parameter estimation from speech and to promote the emerging area of research in this field. Participants will evaluate their algorithms for T60 and DRR estimation against the ‘ground truth’ values provided with the data-sets. Furthermore, they are expected to present the results in a paper describing the method used.

Recently, substantial progress has been made in the field of reverberant speech signal processing, including both single- and multi-channel de-reverberation techniques, and automatic speech recognition (ASR) techniques robust to reverberation. REVERB (REverberant Voice Enhancement and Recognition Benchmark) challenge that provides an opportunity to the researchers in the field to carry out a comprehensive evaluation of their methods based on a common database and on common evaluation metrics.

The challenge will consider the problem of distant multi-microphone conversational speech recognition in everyday home environments. Speech material was elicited using a dinner party scenario with efforts taken to capture data that is representative of natural conversational speech.

2013

The workshop aims to provide a venue for researchers working on computational analysis of sound events and scene analysis to present and discuss their results. We aim to bring together researchers from many different universities and companies with interest in the topic, and provide the opportunity for scientific exchange of ideas and opinions. 



Bio Imaging and Signal Processing

2022

Associated SPS Event: IEEE ICIP 2022 Grand Challenge

Intestinal parasitic infections remain among the leading causes of morbidity worldwide, especially in tropical and sub-tropical areas with more temperate climates. According to WHO, approximately 1.5 billion people, or 24% of the world’s population, are infected with soil-transmitted helminth infections (STH), and 836 million children worldwide required preventive chemotherapy for STH in 2020.

2021

Associated SPS Event: IEEE ICASSP 2021 Grand Challenge

Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) has drastically overwhelmed more than 200 countries around the world affecting millions and claiming more than 1.5 million human lives, since its first emergence in late 2019. This highly contagious disease can easily spread, and if not controlled in a timely fashion, can rapidly incapacitate healthcare systems.

2020

Translational utility is the ability of certain biomedical imaging features to capture useful subject-level characteristics in clinical settings, yielding sensible descriptions and/or predictions for individualized treatment trajectory. An important step in achieving translational utility is to demonstrate the association between imaging features and individual characteristics, such as sex, age, and other relevant assessments, on a large out-of-sample unaffected population (no diagnosed illnesses). This initial step then provides a strong normative basis for comparison with patient populations in clinical settings. Detailed information. Website.

 

 

2019

The goal of the challenge is to evaluate new and existing algorithms for automated detection of liver cancer in whole-slide images (WSIs). There are two tasks and therefore two leaderboards for evaluating the performance of the algorithms. Participants can choose to join both or either tasks according to their interests.

BraTS has always been focusing on the evaluation of state-of-the-art methods for the segmentation of brain tumors in multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. BraTS 2019 utilizes multi-institutional pre-operative MRI scans and focuses on the segmentation of intrinsically heterogeneous (in appearance, shape, and histology) brain tumors, namely gliomas.

Skin cancer is the most common cancer globally, with melanoma being the most deadly form. Dermoscopy is a skin imaging modality that has demonstrated improvement for diagnosis of skin cancer compared to unaided visual inspection. However, clinicians should receive adequate training for those improvements to be realized.

Endoscopic Artefact Detection (EAD) is a core challenge in facilitating diagnosis and treatment of diseases in hollow organs. Precise detection of specific artefacts like pixel saturations, motion blur, specular reflections, bubbles and debris is essential for high-quality frame restoration and is crucial for realising reliable computer-assisted tools for improved patient care.

This challenge aims at creating an open and fair competition for various research groups to test and validate their methods, particularly for the multi-sequence ventricle and myocardium segmentation.

Diffusion MRI has emerged as a key modality for imaging brain tissue microstructural features, yet, validation is necessary for accurate and useful biomarkers. Towards this end, we present the two-year ISBI 2019/2020 diffusion Mri whitE Matter rEcoNstrucTiOn (MEMENTO) challenge. The first year is dedicated to designing the challenge, building the appropriate dataset(s), and making it available to the community. The challenge and participant submissions will take place in the second year, with the aim to evaluate and advance the state of the microstructural modeling field.

The aim of this challenge is to learn effective machine learning models that can estimate a set of clinical significant LV indices (regional wall thicknesses, cavity dimensions, area of cavity and myocardium, cardiac phase) directly from MR images. No intermediate segmentation is required in the whole procedure.

The PALM challenge focuses on investigation and development of algorithms associated with diagnosis of Pathologic Myopia (PM) and segmentation of lesions in fundus photos from PM patients. Myopia is currently the ocular disease with the highest morbidity. About 2 billion people have myopia in the world, 35% of which are high myopia. High myopia leads to elongation of axial length and thinning of retinal structures. With progression of the disease into PM, macular retinoschisis, retinal atrophy and even retinal detachment may occur, causing irreversible impairment to visual acuity.

The aim is to provide a formal framework for evaluating the current state of the art, gather researchers in the field and provide high quality data with protocols for validating endoscopic vision algorithms.

Computer assisted tools can provide cost effective and easily deployable solutions for cancer diagnostics. The aim of this challenge is to build a classifier for the identification of leukemic versus normal immature cells for while blood cancer, namely, B-ALL diagnostics. A dataset of cells with class labels, marked by the expert based on the domain knowledge, will be provided at the subject-level to train the classifier. This problem is interesting because the two cell types appear similar under the microscope and subject-level variability plays a key role.

In 2012, Cell Tracking Challenge (CTC) was launched to objectively compare and evaluate state-of-the-art whole-cell and nucleus segmentation and tracking methods using both real (2D and 3D) time-lapse microscopy videos of cells and nuclei, along with computer generated (2D and 3D) video sequences simulating nuclei moving in realistic environments. To address numerous requests for benchmarking only cell segmentation methods (without tracking), we are launching now a new time-lapse cell segmentation benchmark on the same datasets (plus one new dataset).

In digital pathology, it is often useful to align spatially close but differently stained tissue sections in order to obtain the combined information. The images are large, in general, their appearance and their local structure are different, and they are related through a nonlinear transformation. The proposed challenge focuses on comparing the accuracy and approximative speed of automatic non-linear registration methods for this task. Registration accuracy will be evaluated using manually annotated landmarks.

Digital pathology has been gradually introduced in clinical practice. Although the digital pathology scanner could give very high resolution whole-slide images (WSI) (up to 160nm per pixel), the manual analysis of WSI is still a time-consuming task for the pathologists. Automatic analysis algorithms offer a way to reduce the burden for pathologists. Our proposed challenge will focus on automatic detection and classification of lung cancer using Whole-slide Histopathology. This subject is highly clinical relevant because lung cancer is the top cause of cancer-related death in the world.

CHAOS has two separate but related aims:

  1. Segmentation of liver from computed tomography (CT) data sets, which are acquired at portal phase after contrast agent injection for pre-evaluation of living donated liver transplantation donors (15 training + 15 test sets).
  2. Segmentation of four abdominal organs (i.e. liver, spleen, right and left kidneys) from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data sets acquired with two different sequences (T1-DUAL and T2-SPIR) (15 training + 15 test sets).


Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing

2022

Associated SPS Event: IEEE ICIP 2022 Grand Challenge

High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging provides the ability to capture, manipulate and display real-world lighting. This is a significant upgrade from Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) which only handles up to 255 luminance values concurrently. While capture technologies have advanced significantly over the last few years, currently available HDR capturing sensors (e.g., smartphones) only improve the dynamic range by a few stops over conventional SDR. 

Associated SPS Event: IEEE ICASSP 2022 Grand Challenge

MISP Challenge 2021 has been accepted as a Signal Processing Grand Challenge (SPGC) of ICASSP 2022!Please refer to more details of ICASSP 2022 SPGC.

Associated SPS Event: IEEE ICIP 2022 Grand Challenge

Intestinal parasitic infections remain among the leading causes of morbidity worldwide, especially in tropical and sub-tropical areas with more temperate climates. According to WHO, approximately 1.5 billion people, or 24% of the world’s population, are infected with soil-transmitted helminth infections (STH), and 836 million children worldwide required preventive chemotherapy for STH in 2020.

Associated SPS Event: IEEE ICIP 2022 Grand Challenge

The perceptual quality of images/videos in the context of video surveillance has a very significant impact on high-level tasks such as object detection, identification of abnormal events, visual tracking, to name a few. Despite the development of advanced video sensors with higher resolution, the quality of the acquired video is often affected by some distortions due to the environment, encoding and storage technologies, which can only be avoided by employing of intelligent post-processing solutions.

Associated SPS Event: IEEE ICIP 2022 Grand Challenge

KP Labs, together with ESA (European Space Agency) and partner QZ Solutions, has created an extraordinary challenge, as they will revolutionize the future of farming with the help of in-orbit processing. Maintaining farm sustainability through improving the agricultural management practices by the usage of recent advances in Earth observation and artificial intelligence has become an important issue nowadays. It can not only help farmers face the challenge of producing food at an affordable price, but can also be crucial step toward the planet-friendly agriculture.

Associated SPS Event: IEEE ICASSP 2022 Grand Challenge

The CORSMAL challenge focuses on the estimation of the capacity, dimensions, and mass of containers, the type, mass, and filling (percentage of the container with content), and the overall mass of the container and filling. The specific containers and fillings are unknown to the robot: the only prior is a set of object categories (drinking glasses, cups, food boxes) and a set of filling types (water, pasta, rice).

2021

Associated SPS Event: IEEE MMSP 2021 Grand Challenge

This challenge is meant to consolidate and strengthen research efforts about image inpainting using structural guidance. We will prepare two tracks: image restoration (IR) and image editing (IE). In the IR track, we mask out random areas in an image and provide the edge maps within the areas to help restore the image.

2019

We will organize the first Learning from Imperfect Data (LID) challenge on object semantic segmentation and scene parsing, which includes two competition tracks:

Track1: Object semantic segmentation with image-level supervision

Track2: Scene parsing with point-based supervision

Outdoor scenes are often affected by fog, haze, rain, and smog. Poor visibility in the atmosphere is due to suspended particles. This challenge is meant to consolidate research efforts about single image recovering in adverse weather, especially hazy and rainy days. The challenge consists of two tracks: Hazy Image Recovering (HIR) and Rainy Image Recovering (RIR). In both tracks the researchers are required to recover sharp images from give degraded (hazy and rainy) inputs.

Computer vision technologies have made impressive progress in recent years, but often at the expense of increasingly complex models needing more and more computational and storage resources. This workshop aims to improve the energy efficiency of computer vision solutions for running on systems with stringent resources, for example, mobile phones, drones, or renewable energy systems. Efficient computer vision can enable many new applications (e.g., wildlife observation) powered by ambient renewable energy (e.g., solar, vibration, and wind).

Automatic caption generation is the task of producing a natural-language utterance (usually a sentence) that describes the visual content of an image. Practical applications of automatic caption generation include leveraging descriptions for image indexing or retrieval, and helping those with visual impairments by transforming visual signals into information that can be communicated via text-to-speech technology. The CVPR 2019 Conceptual Captions Challenge is based on two separate test sets:

T1) a blind test set that participants do not have direct access to. 

This workshop will bring together the participants of the first Robotic Vision Challenge, a new competition targeting both the computer vision and robotics communities. The new challenge focuses on probabilistic object detection. The novelty is the probabilistic aspect for detection: A new metric evaluates both the spatial and semantic uncertainty of the object detector and segmentation system. Providing reliable uncertainty information is essential for robotics applications where actions triggered by erroneous but high-confidence perception can lead to catastrophic results.

Drones, or general UAVs, equipped with cameras have been fast deployed to a wide range of applications, including agricultural, aerial photography, fast delivery, and surveillance. Consequently, automatic understanding of visual data collected from these platforms become highly demanding, which brings computer vision to drones more and more closely. We are excited to present a large-scale benchmark with carefully annotated ground-truth for various important computer vision tasks, named VisDrone, to make vision meet drones.

Image restoration and image enhancement are key computer vision tasks, aiming at the restoration of degraded image content, the filling in of missing information, or the needed transformation and/or manipulation to achieve a desired target (with respect to perceptual quality, contents, or performance of apps working on such images). Recent years have witnessed an increased interest from the vision and graphics communities in these fundamental topics of research. Not only has there been a constantly growing flow of related papers, but also substantial progress has been achieved.

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