Blind quality estimation for corrupted source signals based on a-posteriori probabilities

A novel approach is presented for assessing the quality of transmission systems, comprising quantized source signals and APP source decoders, via Monte-Carlo simulation. A-posteriori probabilities are exploited in order to obtain an unbiased estimate of both the symbol error probability and the expected distortion for the transmission system; knowledge of the transmitted source signal is not necessary. Compared to the conventional method this blind quality estimation has a smaller estimation variance