A Temporally Varying Objective Audio Quality Metric

Abstract

Currently, objective audio quality measures designed to mimic the human psychoacoustic system operate by giving a single number to designate the quality of an entire sequence. This methodology is only effective when both the error and the underlying audio sequence are stationary. It is highly desirable to have a quality measure that can predict the quality of time varying errors and sequences. This has applications in many areas, including audio compression, transmission over noisy channels, and further understanding of the human psychoacoustic system.Here we present a metric constructed by adapting several popular audio quality metrics to operate temporally and then combining these metrics into a single objective metric. Results are given over several different error types.