An objective measure for predicting subjective quality of speech coders

A perceptually motivated objective measure for evaluating speech quality is presented. The measure, computed from the original and coded versions of an utterance, exhibits statistically a monotonic relationship with the mean opinion score, a widely used criterion for speech coder assessment. For each 10-ms segment of an utterance, a weighted spectral vector is computed via 15 critical band filters for telephone bandwidth speech. The overall distortion, called Bark spectral distortion (BSD), is the average squared Euclidean distance between spectral vectors of the original and coded utterances. The BSD takes into account auditory frequency warping, critical band integration, amplitude sensitivity variations with frequency, and subjective loudness