Estimation of the Speech Quality Dimension 'Discontinuity'

In a previous study three dimensions have been found relevant for speech-transmission quality: "coloration", "discontinuity", and "noisiness". The present paper focuses on further decomposing and instrumentally measuring the dimension "discontinuity". The auditory experiments revealed three so called sub-dimensions (SD): "Interruptedness", "additive artifacts", and "musical noise classification". A two-step prediction model is thus developed for quality estimation: Firstly, the sub-dimensions are predicted by the combination of instrumentalmeasures. Secondly, "discontinuity" is estimated by combining the extracted sub-dimensions. A correlation of rho = 0.90 can be achieved.