CENSREC-4: An evaluation framework for distant-talking speech recognition in reverberant environments

We have been distributing a new collection of databases and evaluation tools called CENSREC-4, which is a framework for evaluating distant-talking speech in reverberant environments. The data contained in CENSREC-4 are connected digit utterances as in CENSREC-1. Two subsets are included in the data: "basic data sets" and "extra data sets." The basic data sets are used for evaluating the room impulse response-convolved speech data to simulate the various reverberations. The extra data sets consist of simulated data and corresponding real recorded data. Evaluation tools are presently only provided for the basic data sets and will be delivered to the extra data sets in the future. The task of CENSREC-4 with a basic data set appears simple; however, the results of experiments prove that CENSREC-4 provides a challenging reverberation speech-recognition task, in the sense that a traditional technique to improve recognition and a widely used criterion to represent the difficulty of recognition deliver poor performance. Within this context, this common framework can be an important step toward the future evolution of reverberant speech-recognition methodologies.