Digital telecommunication networks may involve a multiple number of public switched telephone networks (PSTN), cellular and mobile systems and to some extent also satellite systems. Most of these networks contain non-linear speech coders and other speech algorithms which may degrade the overall end-to-end quality of speech. An important problem is how to assess the speech quality of such compou...

In VoIP applications, packet loss can have a major impact on perceived speech quality. The impact is affected by factors such as packet loss size, loss pattern and loss locations. In this paper, we report an investigation into the impact of loss location on perceived speech quality and the relationships between convergence time and loss location for three different codecs (G.729, G.723.1 and AM...

A model of human speech quality perception has been developed to provide an objective measure for predicting subjective quality assessments. The Virtual Speech Quality Objective Listener (ViSQOL) model is a signal based full reference metric that uses a spectro-temporal measure of similarity between a reference and a test speech signal. This paper describes the algorithm and compares the result...

The paper presents a unit selection-based speech synthesis approach for mandarin Chinese. Unit selection-based approach generates speech by selecting proper units from a speech corpus and connecting them together. In this approach, a set of features are defined to describe the speech units in the corpus and the expected units in the synthesized utterance. Based on the features, cost function is...

This study proposes an approach to improve the perceptual quality of speech separated by binary masking through the use of reconstruction in the time-frequency domain. Non-negative matrix factorization and sparse reconstruction approaches are investigated, both using a linear combination of basis vectors to represent a signal. In this approach, the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) of separat...

In this paper, we compare and combine different approaches for instrumentally predicting the perceived quality of Text-toSpeech systems. First, a Log-Likelihood is determined by comparing features extracted from synthesized speech signals with features trained on natural speech. Second, parameters are extracted which capture quality-relevant degradations of the synthesized speech signal. Both a...

There is currently a great deal of interest in the development of speech coding algorithms capable of delivering toll quality at 4 kb/s and below. For synthesizing high quality speech, accurate representation of the voiced portions of speech is essential. For bit rates of 4 kb/s and below, conventional Code Excited Linear Prediction (CELP) may likely not provide the appropriate degree of period...

FOR SPEECH ENHANCEMENT ALGORITHMS John H.L. Hansen and Bryan L. Pellom Robust Speech Processing Laboratory Duke University, Box 90291, Durham, NC 27708-0291 http://www.ee.duke.edu/Research/Speech [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT Much progress has been made in speech enhancement algorithm formulation in recent years. However, while researchers in the speech coding and recognition communi...

Based on the performance assessment of speech synthesis systems for Chinese the total quality evaluation of them has been carried out regular since 1994. The total quality evaluation includes speech intelligibility test at different levels (syllable, word and sentence), speech naturalness test and antiinterference ability test for phonetic module and text processing ability test for linguistic ...

This paper discusses recent work in synthesizing a breathy quality in pre-recorded speech, which has applications in voice morphing and concatenative TTS. Previous work has shown that the breathy quality in speech is characterized in part by the presence of random noise in the upper region of the spectrum [1]. The sinusoidal modelling representation of speech facilitates making high-quality mod...