ICASSP 2026 URGENT Speech Enhancement Challenge

TL;DR

The ICASSP 2026 URGENT Challenge promotes development of universal speech enhancement systems capable of handling diverse distortions and conditions, featuring two tracks on enhancement and quality assessment, with strong community engagement.

Contribution

This paper introduces the ICASSP 2026 URGENT Challenge, defining tasks, datasets, baselines, and evaluation protocols for advancing robust speech enhancement technologies.

Findings

Over 80 teams registered, 29 submitted valid entries

Demonstrated significant community interest in robust SE

Established benchmarks for universal speech enhancement

Abstract

The ICASSP 2026 URGENT Challenge advances the series by focusing on universal speech enhancement (SE) systems that handle diverse distortions, domains, and input conditions. This overview paper details the challenge's motivation, task definitions, datasets, baseline systems, evaluation protocols, and results. The challenge is divided into two complementary tracks. Track 1 focuses on universal speech enhancement, while Track 2 introduces speech quality assessment for enhanced speech. The challenge attracted over 80 team registrations, with 29 submitting valid entries, demonstrating significant community interest in robust SE technologies.