Hybrid Signal-and-Link-Parametric Speech Quality Measurement for VoIP Communications

A hybrid signal-and-link-parametric approach to speech quality measurement for voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) communications is described. Connection parameters are used to determine a base quality representative of the transmission link. Degradation factors, computed from perceptual features extracted from the decoded speech signal, are used to quantify distortions not captured by the connection parameters. The algorithm is tested on speech degraded by acoustic noise, temporal clippings, and noise suppression artifacts, thus simulating degradations present in wireless-VoIP tandem connections. Hybrid measurement is shown to overcome the limitations of pure link parametric and pure signal-based measurement methods, resulting in better measurement accuracy for modern VoIP communications. In addition, the proposed algorithm incurs modest computational overhead relative to pure link parametric measurement and attains up to 88% reduction in processing time relative to the ITU-T standard P.563 signal-based algorithm.