Introduction

The objective of this task is the enhancement of speech signals immersed in a noisy 3D environment. Here the models are expected to extract the monophonic voice signal from the 3d mixture containing various background noises. Therefore, for this task we also provide the clean monophonic speech signal as target. 
The evaluation metric for this task is a combination of the short-time objective intelligibility (STOI), which estimates the intelligibility of the output speech signal, and word error rate (WER), computed to assess the effects of the enhancement for speech recognition purposes. The final metric for this task is given by (STOI+(1−WER))/2, which lies in the 0-1 range and higher values are better.

Sound event classes

To generate the spatial sound scenes the measured room IRs are convolved with clean sound samples belonging to distinct sound classes. The noise sound event database we used for task 1 is the well-known FSD50K dataset. In particular, we have selected 12 transient classes,  representative of the noise sounds that can be heard in an office: computer keyboard, drawer open/close, cupboard open/close, finger snapping, keys jangling, knock, laughter, scissors, telephone, writing, chink and clink, printer, and 4 cointinous noise classes: alarm, crackle, mechanical fan and microwave oven.
Furthermore, we extracted clean speech signals (without background noise) from Librispeech, taking only sound files up to 10 seconds.

Dataset specs

The main characteristics of the L3DAS22 Task1 section are:

• more than 40000 virtual 3D audio environments with a duration up to 12 seconds
  
• 16kHz 16 bit AmbiX wav files
• clean voice sounds from Librispeech
• up to 3 non-speech overlapping background noises
• 252 RIRs positions collected in an office-like environment
• a total of nearly 90 hours of audio tracks

The predictors data of this section are released as 8-channels 16kHz 16 bit wav files, consisting of 2 sets of first-order Ambisonics recordings (4 channels each). The channels order is [WA,YA,ZA,XA,WB,YB,ZB,XB], where A/B refers to the used microphone and WYZX  are the b-format ambisonics channels.