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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19760 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19760/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 19 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [UrgentMOS: Unified Multi-Metric and Preference Learning for Robust Speech Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18438/) (2026)
- [Influence of Clean Speech Characteristics on Speech Enhancement Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18885/) (2025)
- [faster-enhancer.c: A Dependency-Free int8 Runtime for Streaming Speech Enhancement on Commodity CPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25350/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Batch Composition: Promoting Feature Diversity for Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.21803/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.