A decade of DCASE: Achievements, practices, evaluations and future challenges

TL;DR

This paper reviews a decade of the DCASE challenge, highlighting its growth, community engagement, open science principles, and future challenges in acoustic scene and event detection research.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of DCASE's history, practices, achievements, and the evolving research landscape over ten years.

Findings

DCASE has become a major research area in audio signal processing.

Open science practices have facilitated reproducibility and community engagement.

The challenge continues to evolve, addressing new tasks and research challenges.

Abstract

This paper introduces briefly the history and growth of the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) challenge, workshop, research area and research community. Created in 2013 as a data evaluation challenge, DCASE has become a major research topic in the Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing area. Its success comes from a combination of factors: the challenge offers a large variety of tasks that are renewed each year; and the workshop offers a channel for dissemination of related work, engaging a young and dynamic community. At the same time, DCASE faces its own challenges, growing and expanding to different areas. One of the core principles of DCASE is open science and reproducibility: publicly available datasets, baseline systems, technical reports and workshop publications. While the DCASE challenge and workshop are independent of IEEE SPS, the challenge receives annual endorsement from the AASP TC, and the DCASE community contributes significantly to the ICASSP flagship conference and the success of SPS in many of its activities.