An objective measure for the musical noise assessment in noise reduction systems

In this paper, a new objective measure is proposed to assess the amount of the wide-band musical noise in an acoustic signal. The measure uses time and frequency characteristics of the musical noise to determine the musicalness of the residual noise. The proposed measure uses noise masking thresholds to measure how much audible the musical noise components are. Furthermore, a harmonicity measure is used to discriminate between the musical noise components and the speech components. At the end, the correlation of the proposed measure with the subjective listening test results is calculated and its performance is verified in experiments.