Helsinki Speech Challenge 2024

The Helsinki Speech Challenge 2024 (HSC2024) invites researchers to enhance and deconvolve speech audio recordings. We recorded a dataset that challenges participants to apply speech enhancement and inverse problems techniques to recorded speech data. This dataset includes paired samples of AI-generated clean speech and corresponding recordings, which feature varying levels of corruption, including frequency attenuation and reverberation. The challenge focuses on developing innovative deconvolution methods to accurately recover the original audio. The effectiveness of these methods will be quantitatively assessed using a speech recognition model, providing a relevant metric for evaluating enhancements in real-world scenarios.

TILT: topological interface recovery in limited-angle tomography

A novel reconstruction method is introduced for the severely ill-posed inverse problem of limited-angle tomography. It is well known that, depending on the available measurement, angles specify a subset of the wavefront set of the unknown target, while some oriented singularities remain invisible in the data. Topological Interface recovery for Limited-angle Tomography, or TILT, is based on lifting the visible part of the wavefront set under a universal covering map. In the space provided, it is possible to connect the appropriate pieces of the lifted wavefront set correctly using dual-tree complex wavelets, a dedicated metric, and persistent homology. The result is not only a suggested invisible boundary but also a computational representation for all interfaces in the target.