Engineering Commons^™

Learning-Based Reference-Free Speech Quality Assessment For Normal Hearing And Hearing Impaired Applications, Haniyeh Salehi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Accurate speech quality measures are highly attractive and beneficial in the design, fine-tuning, and benchmarking of speech processing algorithms, devices, and communication systems. Switching from narrowband telecommunication to wideband telephony is a change within the telecommunication industry which provides users with better speech quality experience but introduces a number of challenges in speech processing. Noise is the most common distortion on audio signals and as a result there have been a lot of studies on developing high performance noise reduction algorithms. Assistive hearing devices are designed to decrease communication difficulties for people with loss of hearing. As the algorithms within …

Objective And Subjective Evaluation Of Wideband Speech Quality, Nazanin Pourmand

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Traditional landline and cellular communications use a bandwidth of 300 - 3400 Hz for transmitting speech. This narrow bandwidth impacts quality, intelligibility and naturalness of transmitted speech. There is an impending change within the telecommunication industry towards using wider bandwidth speech, but the enlarged bandwidth also introduces a few challenges in speech processing. Echo and noise are two challenging issues in wideband telephony, due to increased perceptual sensitivity by users.

Subjective and/or objective measurements of speech quality are important in benchmarking speech processing algorithms and evaluating the effect of parameters like noise, echo, and delay in wideband telephony. Subjective measures …