A New Perceptual Quality Measure for Bit-Rate Reduced Audio
Thilo Thiede, E. Kabot · 1996
Introduction Perceptual audio coding algorithms perform a drastic irrelevancy reduction in order to achieve a high coding gain. Signal components that are assumed to be unperceivable are not transmitted and the coding noise is spectrally shaped according to the masking threshold of the audio signal. Simple quality measures (e.g. signal to noise ratio, harmonic distortions), which can not separate these inaudible artefacts from audible errors, can not be used to assess the performance of such coders. Since subjective listening tests are very time consuming and expensive, there is a strong demand for new measurement systems that are capable to estimate the perceived audio quality of such perceptual coders. Those perceptual measurement methods detect and assess audible artefacts by comparing the output of the codec with the uncoded reference. Most of the known approaches are based on perceptual models for steady state signals. In order to limit computational complexity, they use