Developing the ETSI Aurora advanced distributed speech recognition front-end and what next?

The ETSI STQ-Aurora DSR working group is developing the standard for the advanced DSR front-end. One of the main goals of the advanced front-end is improved robustness to noise compared to the existing ETSI DSR standard for the Mel-cepstrum front-end. The purpose of the paper is firstly to inform the wider speech research community about this activity and then to promote discussion on what further needs there are for DSR front-end standards. The scope of the DSR standard is described and the set of performance requirements that Aurora has specified for the advanced front-end. An important part of this is the evaluation and characterisation of the performance of candidate front-ends on noisy databases, and an overview of these is given. As the competition to select the best proposal draws to a close (submission deadline 28/sup th/ November 2001) an interesting question is "What next?".