The 2nd Clarity Enhancement Challenge for Hearing Aid Speech Intelligibility Enhancement: Overview and Outcomes

Akeroyd, Michael A.; Bailey, Will; Barker, Jon; Cox, Trevor J.; Culling, John F.; Graetzer, Simone; Naylor, Graham; Podwińska, Zuzanna; Tu, Zehai

Abstract

This paper reports on the design and outcomes of the 2nd Clarity Enhancement Challenge (CEC2), a challenge for stimulating novel approaches to hearing-aid speech intelligibility enhancement. The challenge was for a listener attending to a target speaker in a noisy, domestic environment. The challenge extends the previous edition, CEC1, in a number of key respects: scenes have multiple interferers including speech, noise and music; ambisonics are used to model listener head movement; target speaker identity is provided to encourage speaker extraction approaches. Systems are evaluated both via the HASPI intelligibility metric and with listening tests using a panel of hearing-impaired listeners. The paper reviews the 18 systems that were submitted describing them in terms of their enhancement and amplification stages. HASPI is seen to be a good predictor of listener performance. The top system, using carefully engineered neural approaches, produces highly intelligible signals for complex scenes with SNRs down to -12 dB while obeying the challenges 5 ms latency constraint.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: ICASSP 2023 - 2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
• Start Date: Jun 4, 2023
• End Date: Jun 10, 2023
• Publication Date: Jun 4, 2023
• Deposit Date: Jun 14, 2023
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• ISBN: 9781728163284
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/icassp49357.2023.10094918
• Publisher URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10094918