Quality assessment of speech enhancement systems by separation of enhanced speech, noise, and echo

Quality assessment of speech enhancement systems is a nontrivial task, especially when (residual) noise and echo signal components occur. We present a signal separation scheme that allows for a detailed analysis of unknown speech enhancement systems in a black box test scenario. Our approach separates the speech, (residual) noise, and (residual) echo component of the speech enhancement system in the sending direction (uplink direction). This makes it possible to independently judge the speech degradation and the noise and echo attenuation/degradation. While state of the art tests always try to judge the sending direction signal mixture, our new scheme allows a more reliable analysis in shorter time. It will be very useful for testing hands-free devices in practice as well as for testing speech enhancement algorithms in research and development.