An effective quality evaluation protocol for speech enhancement algorithms

FOR SPEECH ENHANCEMENT ALGORITHMS John H.L. Hansen and Bryan L. Pellom Robust Speech Processing Laboratory Duke University, Box 90291, Durham, NC 27708-0291 http://www.ee.duke.edu/Research/Speech [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT Much progress has been made in speech enhancement algorithm formulation in recent years. However, while researchers in the speech coding and recognition communities have standard criteria for algorithm performance comparison, similar standards do not exist for researchers in speech enhancement. This paper discusses the necessary ingredients for an e ective speech enhancement evaluation. We propose that researchers use the evaluation core test set of TIMIT (192 sentences), with a set of noise les, and a combination of objective measures and subjective testing for broad and ne phone-level quality assessment. Evaluation results include overall objective speech quality measure scores, measure histograms, and phoneme class and individual phone scores. The reported results are meant to illustrate speci c ways of detailing quality assessment for an enhancement algorithm.