Navigating PESQ: Up-to-Date Versions and Open Implementations

TL;DR

This paper reviews the evolution of PESQ, highlights the importance of specifying versions for accurate speech quality assessment, and provides an open implementation with the latest corrections to aid researchers.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive guide to PESQ versions, emphasizes the need for precise reporting, and provides an open-source implementation with recent updates.

Findings

Differences between PESQ versions can be significant.

Specifying version and implementation improves result comparability.

The provided repository includes the latest corrections (Corrigendum 2).

Abstract

Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) is an objective quality measure that remains widely used despite its withdrawal by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). PESQ has evolved over two decades, with multiple versions and publicly available implementations emerging during this time. Different versions and their updates can be overwhelming, especially for new PESQ users. This work provides practical guidance on the different versions and implementations of PESQ. We show that differences can be significant, especially between PESQ versions. We stress the importance of specifying the exact version and implementation that is used to compute PESQ, and possibly to detail how multi-channel signals are handled. These practices would facilitate the interpretation of results and allow comparisons of PESQ scores between different studies. We also provide a repository that implements the latest corrections to PESQ, i.e., Corrigendum 2, which is not implemented by any other openly available distribution: https://github.com/audiolabs/PESQ.