An Overview of Subjective and Objective Quality Measures for Noisy Speech Enhancement Algorithms

Many signal processing algorithms have been proposed to enhance the quality and/or intelligibility of speech degraded by the additive background noise. In all speech enhancement algorithms the improvement in the quality and intelligibility are of utmost importance for ease and accuracy of information exchange. The speech quality and intelligibility can be quantified using subjective and objective measures. Subjective speech quality measures are obtained using listening tests in which human participants rate quality of the speech in accordance with a predetermined opinion scale. Objective quality measures predict perceived speech quality based on a computation of the numerical distance or distortion between the original and the processed speech. In this paper, several subjective and objective quality measures that determine the speech quality will be briefly discussed.