The reverb challenge: A common evaluation framework for dereverberation and recognition of reverberant speech

Recently, substantial progress has been made in the field of reverberant speech signal processing, including both single- and multichannel dereverberation techniques, and automatic speech recognition (ASR) techniques robust to reverberation. To evaluate state-of-the-art algorithms and obtain new insights regarding potential future research directions, we propose a common evaluation framework including datasets, tasks, and evaluation metrics for both speech enhancement and ASR techniques. The proposed framework will be used as a common basis for the REVERB (REverberant Voice Enhancement and Recognition Benchmark) challenge. This paper describes the rationale behind the challenge, and provides a detailed description of the evaluation framework and benchmark results.