In this contribution various objective measures that can be used to evaluate speech dereverberation algorithms by means of listening-room compensation (LRC) are compared to subjective listening tests. It is shown that technical measures describing the impulse responses are suitable for evaluation of such algorithms. Most signal-based objective measures fail to judge the specific distortions that may be introduced by LRC algorithms like late reverberation since these artifacts are small in amplitude but perceptually relevant due to the loss of masking of the room impulse response. Only one signal-based measure, the so-called perceptual similarity measure (PSM), showed high correlation with subjective rating for the given test setup.

Sound samples at http://www.ant.uni-bremen.de/~goetze/icassp2010/index.html