Audio Quality Determination Based on Perceptual Measurement Techniques
John G. Beerends · Kluwer Academic Publishers eBooks · 2005
A new, perceptual, approach to determine audio quality is discussed. The method does not characterize the audio system under test but characterizes the perception of the output signal of the audio system. By comparing the degraded output with the ideal (reference), using a model of the human auditory system, predictions can be made about the subjectively perceived audio quality of the system output using any input signal. A perceptual model is used to calculate the internal representations of both the degraded output and reference. A simple cognitive model interprets differences between the internal representations. The method can be used for quality assessment of wideband music codecs as well as for telephone-band (300–3400 Hz) speech codecs. The correlation between subjective and objective results is above 0.9 for a wide variety of databases derived from subjective quality evaluations of music and speech codecs. For the measurement of quality of telephone-band speech codecs a simplified method is given. This method was standardized by the International Telecommunication Union (Telecom sector) as recommendation P.861.