ICASSP 2024 Speech Signal Improvement Challenge

The ICASSP 2024 Speech Signal Improvement Challenge aims to advance research in enhancing speech signal quality within communication systems. The speech signal quality can be assessed using the SIG metric from ITU-T P.835 and still remains a top issue in audio communication and conferencing systems. For example, in the ICASSP 2023 Deep Noise Suppression Challenge, the improvement in the background and overall quality is impressive, while the speech signal enhancement was not statistically significant. To improve the speech signal the following speech impairment areas must be addressed: coloration, discontinuity, loudness, reverberation, and noise. To this end, we organized ICASSP 2024 Speech Signal Improvement Challenge, which marks the second signal-focused challenge, built upon the success of the previous ICASSP 2023 Speech Signal Improvement Challenge. A training and test set was provided for the challenge, and the winners were determined using an extended crowdsourced implementation of ITU-T P.804's listening phase and the word accuracy (WAcc) rate. The results show that significant improvement was made across all measured dimensions of speech quality.