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Sidharth

Publications and source records attributed to Sidharth.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Bitstream-Corrupted Video Restoration: Methods and Results

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Bitstream-Corrupted Video Restoration (BSCVR). The challenge aims to advance research on recovering visually coherent videos from corrupted bitstreams, whose decoding often produces severe spatial-temporal artifacts and content distortion. Built upon recent progress in bitstream-corrupted video recovery, the challenge provides a common benchmark for evaluating restoration methods under realistic corruption settings. We describe the dataset, evaluation protocol, and participating methods, and summarize the final results and main technical trends. The challenge highlights the difficulty of this emerging task and provides useful insights for future research on robust video restoration under practical bitstream corruption.

cs.CV

Sona: Real-Time Multi-Target Sound Attenuation for Noise Sensitivity

For people with noise sensitivity, everyday soundscapes can be overwhelming. Existing tools such as active noise cancellation reduce discomfort by suppressing the entire acoustic environment, often at the cost of awareness of surrounding people and events. We present Sona, an interactive mobile system for real-time soundscape mediation that selectively attenuates bothersome sounds while preserving desired audio. Sona is built on a target-conditioned neural pipeline that supports simultaneous attenuation of multiple overlapping sound sources, overcoming the single-target limitation of prior systems. It runs in real time on-device and supports user-extensible sound classes through in-situ audio examples, without retraining. Sona is informed by a formative study with 68 noise-sensitive individuals. Through technical benchmarking and an in-situ study with 10 participants, we show that Sona achieves low-latency, multi-target attenuation suitable for live listening, and enables meaningful reductions in bothersome sounds while maintaining awareness of surroundings. These results point toward a new class of personal AI systems that support comfort and social participation by mediating real-world acoustic environments.

cs.SD

DISPLACE Challenge: DIarization of SPeaker and LAnguage in Conversational Environments

In multilingual societies, social conversations often involve code-mixed speech. The current speech technology may not be well equipped to extract information from multi-lingual multi-speaker conversations. The DISPLACE challenge entails a first-of-kind task to benchmark speaker and language diarization on the same data, as the data contains multi-speaker conversations in multilingual code-mixed speech. The challenge attempts to highlight outstanding issues in speaker diarization (SD) in multilingual settings with code-mixing. Further, language diarization (LD) in multi-speaker settings also introduces new challenges, where the system has to disambiguate speaker switches with code switches. For this challenge, a natural multilingual, multi-speaker conversational dataset is distributed for development and evaluation purposes. The systems are evaluated on single-channel far-field recordings. We also release a baseline system and report the highlights of the system submissions.

eess.AS