Data Challenges

Supported by the SPS Challenge Program.

Personalised Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) have been shown to enhance auditory localization and immersion in mixed realities. However, relevant issues, such as the accurate acquisition of user-specific anatomical data, efficient simulation algorithms, and effective user validation, do not converge into a common and internationally recognized benchmark for evaluating HRTFs.

Supported by the SPS Challenge Program

The George B. Moody PhysioNet Challenges are annual competitions that invite participants to develop automated approaches for addressing important physiological and clinical problems. The 2024 Challenge invites teams to develop algorithms for digitizing and classifying electrocardiograms (ECGs) captured from images or paper printouts. 

The proposed challenge seeks to push the limits of deep learning algorithms for 3D cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) reconstruction from low-dose projection data (sinogram). 

Supported by the SPS Challenge Program.

Accurate analysis of liver vasculature in three dimensions (3D) is essential for a variety of medical procedures including computer-aided diagnosis, treatment planning, or pre-operative planning of hepatic diseases.

Speech-enabled systems often experience performance degradation in real-world scenarios, primarily due to adverse acoustic conditions and interactions among multiple speakers. Enhancing the front-end speech processing technology is vital for improving the performance of the back-end systems. 

Omnidirectional visual content, commonly referred to as 360-degree images and videos, has garnered significant interest in both academia and industry, establishing itself as the primary media modality for VR/XR applications. 

This challenge will require developing an engine for signal separation  of radio-frequency (RF) waveforms. At inference time, a superposition of a signal of interest (SOI) and an interfering signal will be fed to the engine, which should recover the SOI by performing a sophisticated interference cancellation. 

Supported by the SPS Challenge Program

The George B. Moody PhysioNet Challenges are annual competitions that invite participants to develop automated approaches for addressing important physiological and clinical problems. The 2024 Challenge invites teams to develop algorithms for digitizing and classifying electrocardiograms (ECGs) captured from images or paper printouts. 

The ICASSP 2024 Speech Signal Improvement Challenge is intended to stimulate research in the area of improving the speech signal quality in communication systems. The speech signal quality can be measured with SIG in ITU-T P.835 and is still a top issue in audio communication and conferencing systems.

The L3DAS23 Challenge is aimed at encouraging and fostering collaborative research on machine learning for 3D audio signal processing, with a particular focus on 3D speech enhancement (SE) and 3D sound event localization and detection (SELD) in augmented reality applications.

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

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. 

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.

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.