A simplified version of the ITU algorithm for objective measurement of speech codec quality

ITU-T Recommendation P.861 describes an objective speech quality assessment algorithm for speech codecs [1]. This algorithm transforms codec input and output speech signals into a perceptual domain, compares them, and generates a noise disturbance value, which can be used to estimate perceived speech quality. The performance of this algorithm can be judged by the correlation between those estimates and actual listener opinions from formal subjective listening tests. We show that significant simplifications can be made to the P.861 algorithm with very minimal effect on its performance. Specifically, for the portions of the algorithm under study here, 64% of the floating point operations can be eliminated with only a 3.5% decrease in average correlation to listener opinions. The resulting simplified algorithm may offer a practical new objective function to drive parameter selections, excitation searches, and bit-allocations in speech and audio coders.