Objective quality assessment of echo-impaired full-band speech signals

This paper describes a double-ended objective quality assessment method for evaluating full-band (sampled at 48 kHz) speech signals impaired by acoustic echo and background noise. The proposed method is based on a single metric of the ITU-T standard PEAQ (originally developed for audio signals) that, along with an appropriate mapping function, is shown to be able to reliably predict the overall quality of speech signals concurrently degraded by acoustic echo and background noise. In order to train and validate the proposed method, three speech signal databases were developed and subjectively assessed. One database is used only for training and testing purposes whereas the other two are employed in validation. Using the validation databases, it has been shown that the proposed method can predict the quality of signals degraded with a wider scope of acoustic echo and noise characteristics than those considered in its development.