Conferencingspeech Challenge: Towards Far-Field Multi-Channel Speech Enhancement for Video Conferencing

The ConferencingSpeech 2021 challenge is proposed to stimulate research on far-field multi-channel speech enhancement for video conferencing. The challenge consists of two separate tasks: 1) Task 1 is multi-channel speech enhancement with single microphone array and focusing on practical application with real-time requirement and 2) Task 2 is multi-channel speech enhancement with multiple distributed micro-phone arrays, which is a non-real-time track and does not have any constraints so that participants could explore any algorithms to obtain high speech quality. Targeting the real video conferencing room application, the challenge database was recorded from real speakers and all recording facilities were located by following the real setup of conferencing room. In this challenge, we open-sourced the list of open source clean speech and noise datasets, simulation scripts, and a baseline system for participants to develop their own system. The final ranking of the challenge will be decided by the subjective evaluation which is performed using Absolute Category Ratings (ACR) to estimate Mean Opinion Score (MOS), speech MOS (S-MOS), and noise MOS (N-MOS). This paper describes the challenge, tasks, datasets, subjective evaluation, and challenge results. The baseline system which is a complex ratio mask based neural network and its experimental results are also presented.