An objective method for quality assessment of ultra-wideband speech corrupted by echo

Modern telepresence systems can deliver multimedia signals of unprecedentedly high quality of experience to the user. Setting and maintaining such services call for reliable and automatic tools for multimedia quality probing, in special those targeted at speech data along the transmission path. Most of the objective methods for sound quality assessment (QA) in the literature are intended for either speech signals of 4- to 8-kHz bandwidth or general audio until 24 kHz, but are not specifically designed for speech at high sampling-rates. This work approaches quality evaluation of full-band (24 kHz) high-quality speech corrupted by echo. A simple metric singled out from a standardized double-ended tool for audio QA is proposed as a solution for the problem at hand. Quality measures from a set of speech stimuli corrupted by echo under controlled conditions were obtained via listening tests to allow calibration and evaluation of the proposed method. Experimental results reveal an overall correlation of 0.94 between objective and subjective scores, even in the presence of moderate additive noise.