Perceptual evaluation of blind source separation for robust speech recognition

In a previous article, an evaluation of several objective quality measures as predictors of recognition rate after application of a blind source separation algorithm was reported. In this work, the experiments were repeated using some new measures, based on the perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ), which is part of the ITU P862 standard for evaluation of communication systems. The raw PESQ and a nonlinearly transformed PESQ were evaluated, together with several composite measures. The results show that the PESQ-based measures outperformed all the measures reported in the previous work. Based on these results, we recommend the use of PESQ-based measures to evaluate blind source separation algorithms for automatic speech recognition.