Towards objective quality assessment of speech enhancement systems in a black box approach

Quality assessment of speech enhancement systems has to deal with aspects such as distortion of the near-end talker´s speech, and with the attenuation and distortion of the noise and the echo in different test cases. We propose first steps into the direction of a new black box objective quality assessment of speech enhancement schemes, based on our previous work on decomposition of the (enhanced) speech signal into its components speech, (residual) noise, and (residual) echo. Having these signals available, to our knowledge, for the first time a black box objective quality assessment of an entire speech enhancement system is proposed allowing for simultaneous measurement of, e.g., noise attenuation, echo return loss enhancement (ERLE), and perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) of the speech component in a wide range of test scenarios including double-talk. The derived scheme proves to be very useful for testing hands-free devices in practice but also for objective evaluation of sophisticated algorithms in science.