[CRAC] Call for papers: Special issue on Real-World Sound Recognition

[Dan Ellis <dpwe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

                           CALL FOR PAPERS

               for a Speech Communication Special Issue
                                  on

          Recognition and Organization of Real-World Sound:
                        Papers related to the
  2001 Workshop on Consistent and Reliable Acoustic Cues, CRAC-2001

RATIONALE
Classification and recognition of acoustic signals--particularly
speech--has reached a level of sophistication enabling many practical
applications.  The best recognition systems, however, make strong
assumptions about the nature of the signal and any possible
interference or noise.

At the same time, there is a growing body of research concerned with a
more general class of audio signals, and dealing with them within a
more flexible framework.  From noise-robust speech recognition,
through automatic transcription of recorded music, to various forms of
source separation, this research acknowledges that getting information
from sound is more than a simple pattern recognition problem--not
least because even defining what information is desired is a
challenge, and in almost every case the information must be extracted
at many overlapping levels.

This special issue will represent a spectrum of work unified by the
common theme of handling real-world sounds, with all the implicit
complications.  By covering a range of different processing strategies
and a range of different acoustic analysis tasks, we hope to capture
and showcase the variety, and the commonality, in these problems.

This special issue is a follow-on to a one-day meeting, the Workshop
on Consistent and Reliable Acoustic Cues (CRAC-2001), held as a
satellite event to Eurospeech 2001 in Aalborg, Denmark, last
September.  Although the common theme makes material presented at that
workshop particularly appropriate, this call is completely open, and
all relevant papers are equally welcome.

TOPICS
Submissions should describe previously unpublished research related to
the following topics:

* Identifying sources and extracting information in realistic acoustic
  environments, including:
     Auditory modeling
     Computational auditory scene analysis
     Blind source separation
     SNR estimation
     Confidence measures

* Robust speech recognition strategies, including:
     Missing data techniques
     Noise modeling and compensation
     Multi-stream recognition

* Applications to nonspeech acoustic sources such as musical
  instrument segregation and identification

* Psychoacoustics of corrupt and noisy speech and audio perception

* Combinations of any of the above, such as robust speech recognition
  based on computational auditory scene analysis

PROCEDURE
Full papers should be submitted to the special issue editors before

  * May 15th 2002 *

The preferred format of submission is as a PDF file, via email to
crac@ee.columbia.edu .

Papers are expected to be about 10 pages long in their final form; we
request that double-spaced review versions be a maximum of 30 pages
long.

We will conduct the first pass of reviewing over the summer, and hope
to have the selected papers in their final form by September 2002,
with the special issue to appear about 6 months later.

CONTACT
Special issue editors:

  Dan Ellis, Columbia University (USA)
  dpwe@ee.columbia.edu

  Martin Cooke, Sheffield University (UK)
  m.cooke@dcs.shef.ac.uk

Updates/information will appear on the CRAC website,
  http://www.ee.columbia.edu/crac/

 * end *