Feature analysis for quality assessment of reverberated speech

This paper analyzes the ability of several measurements to quantify the reverberation effect in speech signals. We consider an intrusive scheme, in which the clean and reverberated signals are available, allowing one to estimate the corresponding room impulse response (RIR) signal. An artificial neural network (ANN) is trained for all features and used in a regression approach to estimate the human perceptual evaluation in a mean opinion score (MOS) 1–5 scale. Dimensionality reduction approaches are applied to generate a simpler ANN regression, establishing the most representative features for the problem at hand. A correlation level of 85% with subjective test scores was achieved by reducing the input-vector dimension from 10 to 3, including only the features of reverberation time, room spectral variance, and direct-to-reverberant energy ratio.