Title
Subjective and objective assessment of full bandwidth speech quality
Author
Beerends, J.G.
Neumann, N.M.P.
van den Broek, E.L.
Casanovas, A.L.
Menendez, J.T.
Schmidmer, C.
Berger, J.
Publication year
2020
Abstract
With the introduction of fullband speech coding the question arises what role frequency components above 14 kHz play in speech quality assessment. On the one hand, our results show that bandwidth limitation from 24 kHz down to 14 kHz is not audible to even the most critical subject. On the other hand, 14-24 kHz band limited, audible levels of noise clearly decrease the perceived quality, especially for young subjects with healthy ears. Furthermore, modern high-quality voice links, using the latest speech codecs, often apply advanced buffering schemes that introduce a new type of audible degradation: Micropauses. We investigated the impact of i) bandwidth limitation, ii) coding schemes, iii) micropause, and iv) noise on the perceived quality. Subjective results and objective predictions based on ITU-T recommendation P.863 POLQA are compared. For accurate prediction of the impact of micropauses and noise degradations small model adaptations are suggested. In contrast codec degradations and bandwidth limitation are already predicted with very high accuracy by POLQA: R = 0.98, RMSE= 0.05 Mean Opinion Score (MOS). © 2014 IEEE.
Subject
Full bandwidth speech quality
POLQA
Speech
Accurate prediction
Bandwidth limitation
Frequency components
Mean opinion scores
Objective assessment
POLQA
Speech quality
Speech quality assessment
Bandwidth
To reference this document use:
http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:437fc3aa-30ef-497b-9c35-4c25412866ba
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/taslp.2019.2957871
TNO identifier
872039
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISSN
2329-9290
Source
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing, 28, 440-449
Article number
8926509
Document type
article