Advances in objective voice quality assessment

The quality of transmitted voice is an important means of gauging performance of voice equipment and services. Such quality information has traditionally been provided by human listeners. Due to time and costs of conducting listener tests, the need for automatic objective assessment techniques is growing rapidly. The authors review the status of objective voice quality technology, including four newer techniques being considered by the CCITT. Recent performance tests based on a low-bit-rate codec speech database are presented. The relative and accuracy of objective and subjective techniques is discussed and compared