Speech quality measurement based on classification estimation

Abstract

Auditory processing is used in conjunction with cognitive mapping to produce an objective measurement of speech quality that approximates a subjective measurement such as MOS. In order to generate a data model for measuring speech quality from a clean speech signal and a degraded speech signal, the clean speech signal is subjected to auditory processing to produce a subband decomposition of the clean speech signal; the degraded speech signal is subjected to auditory processing to produce a subband decomposition of the degraded speech signal; and cognitive mapping is performed based on the clean speech signal, the subband decomposition of the clean speech signal, and the subband decomposition of the degraded speech signal. Various statistical analysis techniques, such as MARS and CART, may be employed, either alone or in combination, to perform data mining for cognitive mapping. From the large number of features extracted from the distortion surface, MARS is employed to find a smaller subset of features to form the speech quality estimator. The subset of feature variables, together with the particular manner of combining them, are jointly optimized to produce a statistically consistent estimate (data model) of subjective opinion scores such as MOS.