PLEASE NOTE: If you are a public sector employee (government and education), all prize awards will be awarded directly to your public sector organization and subject to receipt of a gift letter signed by your agency/institution’s ethics officer, attorney, or designated executive/officer responsible for your organization’s gifts/ethics policy. Microsoft will not be party to any disputes or actions related to this matter. 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’s gift policies. Void in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, Region of Crimea, and where prohibited. 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). 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. Open to any registered Event attendee 18 years of age or older.
The Entry Period is divided into several periods as described in section How to Enter. The Contest will operate from Septemto Octo(“Entry Period”). 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. “Event” refers to the ICASSP 2021 AEC (see overview) event held in Toronto, Canada (the “Event”). In these Rules, “Microsoft”, “we”, “our”, and “us”, refer to Sponsor and “you” and “yourself” 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. Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA, 98052, USA, is the Contest sponsor (“Sponsor”). These Official Rules (“Rules”) govern the operation of the Microsoft M365 Core ICASSP 2021 AEC (see overview) Event Contest (“Contest”). Submission deadline: Oct 9, 2020, 11:59pm (anywhere on Earth)
In this challenge, we open source two large datasets to train AEC models under both single talk and double talk scenarios. 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.
However, the AEC performance often degrades significantly on real recordings. Many recent AEC studies report reasonable performance on synthetic datasets where the train and test samples come from the same underlying distribution. 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.