The CCF AATC 2025: Speech Restoration Challenge

Abstract: Real-world speech communication is often hampered by a variety of distortions that degrade quality and intelligibility. While many speech enhancement algorithms target specific degradations like noise or reverberation, they often fall short in realistic scenarios where multiple distortions co-exist and interact. To spur research in this area, we introduce the Speech Restoration Challenge as part of the China Computer Federation (CCF) Advanced Audio Technology Competition (AATC) 2025. This challenge focuses on restoring speech signals affected by a composite of three degradation types: (1) complex acoustic degradations including non-stationary noise and reverberation; (2) signal-chain artifacts such as those from MP3 compression; and (3) secondary artifacts introduced by other pre-processing enhancement models. We describe the challenge's background, the design of the task, the comprehensive dataset creation methodology, and the detailed evaluation protocol, which assesses both objective performance and model complexity. Homepage: https://ccf-aatc.org.cn/.