6 posts tagged with "CEC1"

The CEC1 submission deadline has now passed. Thank you to all the teams who sent us signals.

Please remember to submit your finalised system descriptions by June 22nd to the Clarity workshop following the instructions provided on the workshop website.

We are currently busy evaluating the submissions using the MBSTOI metric. We will be contacting teams on the 22nd with details of how to prepare signals for the listening panel evaluation.

If you have been working on the challenge but missed the submission deadline then please do get in contact. We will still be happy to receive your signals and system descriptions. Although late entries will not be eligible for the official challenge ranking, we will be happy to compute the eval set MBSTOI score for you and may even be able to arrange listening test evaluation through our panel.

For any questions please contact us at claritychallengecontact@gmail.com or by posting to the Clarity challenge google group.

The evaluation dataset is now available to download from the myairbridge download site. The evaluation data filename is clarity_CEC1_data.scenes_eval.v1_1.tgz.

Full details of how to prepare your submission are now available on this site. Please read them carefully.

Registration: Teams must register via the Google form on the How To Submit page of this site. (Please complete this even if you have already completed a pre-registration form). Only one person from each team should register. Only those who have registered will be eligible to proceed to the evaluation. Once you have registered you will receive a confirmation email, a team ID and a link to a Google Drive to which you can upload your signals.

Submission deadline: The deadline for submission is the 15th June.

The submission consists of two components:

i) a technical document of up to 2 pages describing the system/model and any external data and pre-existing tools, software and models used. This should be prepared as a Clarity-2021 workshop abstract and submitted to the workshop.

ii) the set of processed signals that we will evaluate using the MBSTOI metric. Details of how to name and package your signals for upload can be found on the How To Submit page.

Listening Tests: Teams that do well in the MBSTOI evaluation will be notified on 22nd June and invited to submit further signals for the second stage Listening Test evaluation.

For any questions please contact us at claritychallengecontact@gmail.com or by posting to the Clarity challenge google group.

Some comments on signal alignment and level-insensitivity​

Our baseline binaural speech intelligibility measure in round one is the Modified Binaural Short-Time Objective Intelligibility measure, or MBSTOI. This short post outlines the importance of correcting for delays that your hearing aid processing algorithm introduces into the audio signals to allow MBSTOI to estimate the speech intelligibility accurately. It also discusses the importance of considering the audibility of signals before evaluation with MBSTOI.

Evaluation​

In stage one, entries will be ranked according to the average MBSTOI score across all samples in the evaluation test set. In the second stage, entries will be evaluated by the listening panel. There will be prizes for both stages. See this page for more information.

Although age-related hearing loss affects 40% of 55 to 74 year-olds, the majority of adults who would benefit from hearing aids don’t use them. A key reason is simply that hearing aids don’t provide enough benefit.

Picking out speech from background noise is a critical problem even for the most sophisticated devices. The purpose of the Clarity Challenges is to catalyse new work to radically improve the speech intelligibility provided by hearing aids.

The series of challenges will consider increasingly complex listening scenarios. The first round, launching in January 2021, will focus on speech in indoor environments in the presence of a single interferer. It will begin with a challenge involving improving hearing aid processing. Future challenges on how to model speech-in-noise perception will be launched at a later date.

We’ll be challenging our contestants to find innovative ways of making speech more audible for hearing impaired listeners when there is noise getting in the way. But what noises should we consider? To aid us in choosing sounds and situations that are relevant to people with hearing aids, we held a focus group.

We wanted to know about

• Everyday background noises that make having a conversation difficult.
• The characteristics of speech after it has been processed by a hearing-aid that hearing aid listeners would value.

A total of eight patients (four males, four females) attended the meeting, six of whom were recruited from the Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre’s patient and public involvement contact list. Two attendees were recruited from a local lip reading class organised by the Nottinghamshire Deaf Society. The range of hearing loss within the group is from mild to severe. They all regularly use bilateral hearing aids.

Our focus was on the living room because that is the scenario for round one of the challenges.

Photo by Gustavo Fring from Pexels

Welcome to the new Clarity blog. We will be using this blog to post regular updates about our Challenges and Workshop, as well as posts discussing the tools and techniques that we are using in our baseline systems.