The CHiME corpus: a resource and a challenge for computational hearing in multisource environments

We present a new corpus designed for noise-robust speech processing research, CHiME. Our goal was to produce material which is both natural (derived from reverberant domestic environments with many simultaneous and unpredictable sound sources) and controlled (providing an enumerated range of SNRs spanning 20 dB). The corpus includes around 40 hours of background recordings from a head and torso simulator positioned in a domestic setting, and a comprehensive set of binaural impulse responses collected in the same environment. These have been used to add target utterances from the Grid speech recognition corpus into the CHiME domestic setting. Data has been mixed in a manner that produces a controlled and yet natural range of SNRs over which speech separation, enhancement and recognition algorithms can be evaluated. The paper motivates the design of the corpus, and describes the collection and post-processing of the data. We also present a set of baseline recognition results.