Publication
RescueSpeech: A German Corpus for Speech Recognition in Search and Rescue Domain
Sangeet Sagar; Mirco Ravanelli; Bernd Kiefer; Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová
In: 2023 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU) - Proceedings. IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU-2023), December 16-20, Taipei, Taiwan, Province of China, IEEE Xplore, 2023.
Abstract
Despite the recent advancements in speech recognition, there
are still difficulties in accurately transcribing conversational
and emotional speech in noisy and reverberant acoustic en-
vironments. This poses a particular challenge in the search
and rescue (SAR) domain, where transcribing conversations
among rescue team members is crucial to support real-time
decision-making. The scarcity of speech data and associated
background noise in SAR scenarios make it difficult to deploy
robust speech recognition systems.
To address this issue, we have created and made publicly
available a German speech dataset called RescueSpeech. This
dataset includes real speech recordings from simulated rescue
exercises. Additionally, we have released competitive train-
ing recipes and pre-trained models. Our study highlights that
the performance attained by state-of-the-art methods in this
challenging scenario is still far from reaching an acceptable
level.