Re: [AUDITORY] PESQ

Hello Omid :)

That an algorithm is published does not necessarily mean that it can be used freely, it might have been patented/protected before its publication. A famous example is the compression used in the GIF image format http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Unisys%5Fand%5FLZW%5Fpatent%5Fenforcement

But I believe that research is exempted from any patent rights (see for example http://www.ipo.gov.uk/consult-patresearch.pdf). As Stefan did perform research with PESQ, to my understanding, he is only required to pay a fee if he used a commercial implementation like Opticom's C-code. @Stefan: is the 7000USD quote for an academic licence of the OEM implementation or did they say that you also need to acquire a patent licence to publish PESQ scores in scientific papers? To my understanding, using an open source or "self-made" implementation of a patented algorithm for research should be free of any copyright and patent licence fees.

:) stefan

On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 6:44 AM, Sadjadi, Omid <sadjadi@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Can you point us to the document that has this information? I highly doubt this.

The paper describing PESQ is publicly available (to IEEE members), which means everyone can implement and use this metric:

A.W. Rix, J.G., Beerends, M.P. Hollier and A.P. Hekstra, "Perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ)-a new method for speech quality assessment of telephone networks and codecs," in Proc. IEEE ICASSP, Salt Lake City, UT, May 2001, pp.749-752.

Omid
________________________________________
From: AUDITORY - Research in Auditory Perception [AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] on behalf of Stefan Bleeck [bleeck@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2013 9:43 AM
To: AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [AUDITORY] PESQ

I just found out that the _academic_ use of PESQ (perceptual
evaluation of speech quality, ITU recommendation P.862), that is
described with MATLAB source code in Loizou's Speech Enhancement
book, requires a license that costs around $7000 per year. I write
this as a warning for others against using it (unless you happen to
have the spare cash), because we didn't know this and did a lot of
work with it that we now can't publish.

--
Dr. Stefan Bleeck
Hearing and Balance Centre
Institute of Sound and Vibration Research
Faculty of Engineering and the Environment
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Room 4093, Tizard building (13)
bleeck@xxxxxxxxx Tel.: 02380 596682