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15 posts tagged with "clarity"

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· One min read
Jon Barker

The CPC2 evaluation data has now been released.

The data is available for download as a single 478 MB file, clarity_CPC2_data.test.v1_0.tgz. The evaluation data should be untarred into the same root as the training data. Further details can be found on the challenge website.

The data consists of the hearing aid algorithm output signals, clean reference signals, listener audiograms, and head rotation information. Listener responses are not provided for the evaluation data but will be made available after the submission window has closed.

For details on how to prepare your submission please see the instructions on the website.

If you have any questions please feel free to post them on this forum.

The submission window will close on the 31st of July.

Good luck!

· 3 min read
Jon Barker

We are pleased to announce the 4th ISCA Clarity Workshop on Machine Learning Challenges for Hearing Aids (Clarity-2023).

The event will be a one-day workshop held as an ISCA satellite event to Interspeech 2023 in Dublin, Ireland.

For registration and programme details please visit the workshop website

https://claritychallenge.github.io/clarity2023-workshop/

IMPORTANT DATES

  • 2nd June 2023 - Workshop Submission Deadline (Regular Papers)
  • 31st July 2023 - Workshop Submission Deadline (Clarity Challenge Papers)
  • 5th August 2023 - Registration closes
  • 19th August - Workshop / Clarity Challenge results announced

About

One of the biggest challenges for hearing-impaired listeners is understanding speech in the presence of background noise. Everyday social noise levels can have a devastating impact on speech intelligibility. The inability to communicate effectively can lead to social withdrawal and isolation. Disabling hearing impairment affects 360 million people worldwide, with that number increasing because of the ageing population. Unfortunately, current hearing aid technology is often ineffective in noisy situations. Although amplification can restore audibility, it does not compensate fully for the effects of hearing loss.

The Clarity workshops are designed to stimulate a two-way conversation between the speech research community and hearing aid developers. Hearing aid developers, who are not typically represented at Interspeech, will have an opportunity to present the challenges of their industry to the speech community; the speech community will be able to present and discuss potentially transformative approaches to speech in noise processing in the presence of hearing researchers and industry experts.

Topics

Any work related to the challenges of hearing aid signal processing will be considered relevant topics include,

  • Binaural technology for speech enhancement and source separation
  • Multi-microphone processing technology
  • Real-time approaches to speech enhancement
  • Statistical model-driven approaches to hearing aid processing
  • Audio quality & intelligibility assessment hearing aid and cochlear implant users
  • Efficient and effective integration of psychoacoustic testing in machine learning
  • Machine learning for diverse target listeners
  • Machine learning models of hearing impairment

The 2nd Clarity Prediction Challenge

The Clarity-2023 will also host the 2nd Clarity Prediction Challenge, that is addressing the problem of developing new intrusive and non-intrusive approaches to hearing-aid speech intelligibility prediction. The Challenge will be launching on 1st March, is you may be interested in participating please sign up to our Google group for further announcements.

Keynote Talks

  • Prof Fei Chen, SUSTech, China,
  • Prof DeLiang Wang, Ohio State University, US

Organisers

  • Michael Akeroyd, University of Nottingham
  • Jon Barker, University of Sheffield
  • Trevor Cox, University of Salford
  • Fei Chen, Southern University of Science and Technology, China
  • John Culling, University of Cardiff
  • Simone Graetzer, University of Salford
  • Andrew Hines, University College Dublin

For further information

To be kept up to date please join our Clarity Challenge Google group. If you have questions, please contact us directly using the contact details found here.

Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), UK

Supported by RNID (formerly Action on Hearing Loss), Hearing Industry Research Consortium, Amazon TTS Research

· 2 min read
Jon Barker
Trevor Cox

The 2nd Clarity Prediction Challenge - Register Now

To allow the development of better hearing aids, we need ways to evaluate the speech intelligibility of audio signals automatically. We need a prediction model that takes the audio produced by a hearing aid and the listener's characteristics (e.g. audiogram) and estimates the speech intelligibility score that the listener would achieve in a listening test.

Last year we ran the CPC1 Challenge to develop such models. The challenge was presented at an online workshop and a special session of Interspeech 2022. We are now running the 2nd round of this challenge (CPC2), which builds on the first by using more complex signals and a larger set of listening test data for training and evaluating the prediction systems.

The outputs of the new challenge will be presented at an ISCA workshop that is being run as a satellite event to Interspeech 2023 in Dublin on 19th August 2023.

Full details can be found on the Challenge Website.

Register now to take part

If you are interested in participating please register now via the online registration form.

Important Dates

  • March - Launch of challenge, release of training data + baseline system.
  • 1st July - Release of evaluation data and opening of submission window.
  • 31st July - Submission deadline.
  • 19th August - ISCA Clarity 2023 workshop @ Interspeech
  • 19th September - Deadline for submission of finalised Workshop papers

What will be provided

  • Audio produced by a variety of (simulated) hearing aids for speech-in-noise;
  • The corresponding clean reference signals (the original speech);
  • Characteristics of the listeners (pure tone audiograms, etc);
  • The measured speech intelligibility scores from listening tests, where hearing-impaired listeners were asked to say what they heard after listening to the hearing aid processed signals.
  • Software tools including a baseline system based on HASPI scores.

For further information

To be kept up to date please join our Clarity Challenge Google group. If you have questions, please contact us directly using the contact details found here.

· One min read
Jon Barker
Trevor Cox

We are pleased to announce that the evaluation dataset for the ICASSP Clarity Challenge is now available for download.

https://www.myairbridge.com/en/#!/folder/EkthOZZeBW33aaDBWSDadTgpOkbgaFxO

For instructions on preparing your submission please visit:

https://claritychallenge.org/docs/icassp2023/taking_part/icassp2023_submission

If you have not yet registered it is not too late to do so. Please use the form at the link below and we will then send you a Team ID and a personalised upload link for your submission.

https://claritychallenge.org/docs/icassp2023/taking_part/icassp2023_registration

Note, we have extended the deadline for submission until Friday 10th February so that teams have a full week to process the signals.

The remaining schedule is as follows,

  • 2nd Feb 2023: Release of evaluation data.
  • 10th Feb 2023: Teams submit processed signals and technical reports.
  • 14th Feb 2023: Results released. Top 5 ranked teams invited to submit papers to ICASSP-2023
  • 20th Feb 2023: Invited papers submitted to ICASSP-2023
  • 4-9th June 2023: Overview paper and invited papers presented at dedicated ICASSP session

· One min read

We are pleased to announce that registration for the ICASSP 2023 Clarity Grand Challenge is now open.

To register please complete the simple Google form found on the registration page.

The remaining important dates for the challenge are as follows:

  • 28th Nov 2022: Challenge launch: Release training/dev data; tools; baseline; rules & documentation.
  • 2nd Feb 2023: Release of evaluation data.
  • 10th Feb 2023: Teams submit processed signals and technical reports.
  • 14th Feb 2023: Results released. Top 5 ranked teams invited to submit papers to ICASSP-2023
  • 20th Feb 2023: Invited papers submitted to ICASSP-2023
  • 4-9th June 2023: Overview paper and invited papers presented at dedicated ICASSP session

The challenge training, dev data and initial tools are now fully from the Github repository.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us at claritychallengecontact@gmail.com.

· One min read
Jon Barker

The 1st Clarity Prediction Challenge is now complete. Thank you to all who took part!

The full results can be found on the Clarity-2022 workshop website where you will also find links to system papers and the overview presentation.

Many of the systems have led to successful Interspeech 2022 papers and will be contributing to the Interspeech 2022 special session on Speech Intelligibility Prediction for Hearing-Impaired Listeners. We hope to see many of you in Korea!

In the meantime, please be sure to check out the onging 2nd Clarity Enhancement Challenge. The deadline for submitting enhanced signals is 1st September 2022, so there is still time to participate. To register a team please use the form here.

· One min read
Jon Barker

We are pleased to announce that registration for the 2nd Clarity Enhancement Challenge (CEC2) is now open.

To register please complete the simple Google form found on the registration page.

The remaining important dates for the challenge are as follows:

  • 25th July 2022: Evaluation data released
  • 1st Sept 2022: 1st round submission deadline for evaluation by objective measure
  • 15th Sept 2022: 2nd round submission deadline for listening tests
  • Sept-Nov 2022: Listening test evaluation period.
  • 2nd Dec 2022: Results announced at a Clarity Challenge Workshop; prizes awarded.

The challenge training, dev data and initial tools are now fully from the Github repository.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us at claritychallengecontact@gmail.com.

· One min read
Jon Barker

We are pleased to announce the release of the 2nd Clarity Enhancement Challenge (CEC2) baseline system code.

The baseline code has been released in the latest commit to the Clarity GitHub repository.

The baseline system perform NAL-R amplification according to the audiogram of the target listener, followed by a simple gain control and output of the signals to 16-bit stereo wav format. The system has been kept deliberately simple with no microphone array processing or attempt at noise cancellation.

HASPI scores for the dev set have been measured. The scores are as follows.

SystemHASPI
Unprocessed0.1615
NAL-R baseline0.2493

See here for further details.

If you have any problems using the baseline code please do not hesitate to contact us at claritychallengecontact@gmail.com, or post questions on the Google group.

· One min read
Jon Barker

We are pleased to announce the launch of the 2nd Clarity Enhancement Challenge (CEC2).

The website has been fully updated to provide you with all the information you will need to participate in the challenge.

The schedule for the challenge is as follows:

  • 13th April 2022: Release of training and development data; initial tools.
  • 30th April 2022: Release of full toolset and baseline system.
  • 1st May 2022: Registration for challenge entrants opens.
  • 25th July 2022: Evaluation data released
  • 1st Sept 2022: 1st round submission deadline for evaluation by objective measure
  • 15th Sept 2022: 2nd round submission deadline for listening tests
  • Sept-Nov 2022: Listening test evaluation period.
  • 2nd Dec 2022: Results announced at a Clarity Challenge Workshop; prizes awarded.

The challenge training, dev data and initial tools will be available from 13th April. In the meantime, please visit the CEC2 Intro page to learn more about the task.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us at claritychallengecontact@gmail.com.

· 2 min read
Lara Harris

The Clarity team are hosting two live sessions this month related to the Prediction Challenge. Everyone is welcome to attend, whether or not you have registered to participate in the challenge or are still considering signing up.

The presentations will be very similar to the webinar in November. These events are intended as a chance for people in different time zones to attend live and ask the team questions.

Hosting is via Microsoft Teams. You can join from your browser without needing to install Teams, but if you join from a mobile device you may need to install the Teams app.

Webinar - Challenge Overview

Friday 14th January

9:00 GMT | 17:00 CST (GMT+8)

Click here to join the webinar

An introduction to the aims of the challenge and some background to the problem of speech intelligibility prediction for hearing aids:

  • Welcome, introduction to Clarity.
  • Speech intelligibility models: Overview and why are they needed.
  • Hearing impairment speech intelligibility prediction.
  • The prediction challenge - details and how you can sign up to participate.
  • Audience questions / discussion.

The presentations will be recorded and made available online shortly after the event. The Q&A discussion will not be recorded.

You are welcome to join slightly later if you are only interested in joining for the Q&A section (presentations should finish around 9:40 GMT).

Live Q&A session

Monday 17th January

17:00 GMT | 12:00 EST (GMT-5) | 9:00 PST (GMT-8)

Click here to join the Q&A

A chance to ask the team questions about the Clarity Prediction Challenge - for anyone that could not attend the webinar on Friday 14th due to time zone differences.

Please note there will be no presentations in this session. The talks from Friday’s webinar will be uploaded to the Clarity project YouTube channel later in the day so you are invited to watch those before joining this live Q&A.

· One min read
Lara Harris

The Clarity team recently hosted a webinar to introduce the Prediction Challenge. The recording is now available to view online:

The slides are available to download:

1 Welcome and Overview

2 Speech Intelligibility Models

3 Hearing Impariment and SI Prediction

4 Clarity Prediction Challenge Details

Note that we did not record the Q&A session at the end, but if you have questions about taking part in the challenge you can contact us at claritychallengecontact@gmail.com

· One min read
Trevor Cox

Welcome to the new Clarity CPC1 site for the first prediction challenge launching in autumn 2021. Feel free to look around. At the moment we're still doing listening tests and preparing the data, so the download links don't work. If anything is unclear or you've got questions, please contact us through the Google group.

· One min read
Jon Barker

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.

· 2 min read
Jon Barker

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.

· One min read
Jon Barker

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.