Estimation of the speech quality of noise reduced signals

The evaluation of noise reduction systems is mandatory to ensure that speech quality is improved or at least preserved. Today, there is only one and only one methodology to evaluate noise suppression algorithms, which is standardized by the ITU (International Telecommunications Union): this is a subjective procedure described in ITU-T Recommendation P.835. According to this procedure, we designed an instrumental tool called POMNR (Perceptual Objective Measure for Noise Reduction systems). We focus here on the computation of the "speech score" provided by POMNR. Analysis of experimental results shows that it is a very promising approach leading to high correlation with the standardized subjective procedure.