Subjective Quality Estimation Using PESQ For Hands-Free Terminals

Abstract

Previous reports have mentioned the possibility that subjective quality of the echo-suppressed speech signal can be estimated based on perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ), but there are few experimental results. We propose third-party listening and conversational test procedures to assess whether PESQ can be used for predicting the subjective quality of an acoustic echo canceler. In the proposed third-party listening test procedure, near-end and far-end signals are presented separately in the left and right channels of stereo playback and differential category rating evaluation is applied to those stimuli for obtaining differential mean opinion scores. In the proposed conversational test procedure, impaired and non-impaired reference signals are recorded during a conversation to make PESQ processing possible. Experimental results indicate that there is a strong correlation between PESQ and subjective scores.