Perceptual Differences and Preferences in Speech Enhancement

Speech enhancement (SE) systems are commonly evaluated with objective metrics, with and without references, and with categorical subjective listening tests, all measuring speech quality and intelligibility. So far, it is unclear from such evaluations whether the processed speech is perceptually different or is preferred by everyday listeners. We investigate discrimination and preference as complementary dimensions of SE evaluation through crowdsourced triangle and pairwise preference tests across four SE systems, with comparisons to clean references. Results show that both listeners' ability to distinguish and whether they exhibit systematic preference vary across systems and substantially across acoustic conditions. Pairwise evaluations of objective metrics showed variable correlation with both discriminability and preference, motivating further studies into these novel aspects in speech enhancement evaluation.