Influence of informational content of background noise on speech quality evaluation for VoIP application
Adrien Leman, Julien Faure, Étienne Parizet · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2008
With the rise of mobile communication systems, the background noise in the speaker's environment and its interaction with VoIP network impairment affects speech quality perception. This effect should be taken into account in nonintrusive models in order to improve accuracy of end user perception measurement. The aim of this study is to determine the impact of information contained in background noise (background speech, environmental sources) on speech quality perception. A subjective test on the speech quality perception in real network conditions has been done comparing the effect of stationary background noise mainly due to transmission equipment (electrical humming or blowing noises) with the effect of nonstationary environmental noise (public place, traffic noise, background conversation). Interactions between these different background noise condition and realistic network impairments (coders and packets loss) were also studied. The speech quality was evaluated through the Mean Opinion Score determined from an Absolute Category Rating method.