Analytical assessment and distance modeling of speech transmission quality

The quality of transmitted speech is based on the auditory characteristics the degraded signal provokes. In past studies, it has been shown that the main features of speech transmission can be subsumed under the orthogonal perceptual dimensions “discontinuity”, “noisiness”, and “coloration”. In order to gain more insight into the dimensional composition for arbitrary transmission conditions, an auditory method is described in this paper which allows for assessing these dimensions efficiently. The results can be used to model the total impairment, a measure of the reduction of integral quality which is compliant with the E-model, a parametric tool for speech quality prediction. The model derived in this paper is based on a distance function and yields a correlation of r = 0.97 between subjective scores and model predictions for the Euclidean case.