An Analysis of the Impact of Playout Delay Adjustments introduced by VoIP Jitter Buffers on Listening Speech Quality

Počta, Peter; Melvin, Hugh; Hines, Andrew

doi:10.3813/aaa.918857

Cited by 13 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…The per condition results previously reported [42] showed that there was poor correlation between subjective and objective scores for all metrics tested but this was as a result of the playout delay changes not being a dominant factor in the speech quality. The results were analyzed for PESQ and POLQA [42] and subsequently for ViSQOL [28], showing MOS scores grouped by speaker and variant instead of playout condition.…”

Section: Experiments 2: Playout Delay Changesmentioning

confidence: 82%

“…Experiment 2 evaluates the impact of small playout adjustments due to jitter buffers on objective quality assessment. Experiment [28,42], where POLQA and ViSQOL show inconsistent quality estimations for some combinations of speaker and playout adjustments. Experiment 4 uses a subjectively labeled database of VoIP degradations to benchmark model performance for clock drift, packet loss, and jitter.…”

Section: Performance Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Work by Pocta et al [42] used sentences from the English speaking portion of ITU-T P Supplement 23 codedspeech database [44] to develop a test corpus of realistic delay adjustment conditions. One hundred samples (96 degraded and four references, two male and two female speakers) covered a range of 12 realistic delay adjustment conditions.…”

Section: Experiments 2: Playout Delay Changesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The adjustments used are typical (in extent and magnitude) of those introduced by VoIP jitter buffer algorithms [45]. The subjective test results showed that speaker voice preference dominated the subjective test results more than playout delay adjustment duration or location [42]. By design, full-reference objective metrics, including ViSQOL, do not qualify speaker voice difference reducing their correlation with the subjective tests.…”

Section: Experiments 2: Playout Delay Changesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The results were analyzed for PESQ and POLQA [42] and subsequently for ViSQOL [28], showing MOS scores grouped by speaker and variant instead of playout condition. The combined results from both studies are presented in Figure 9.…”

Section: Experiments 2: Playout Delay Changesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

ViSQOL: an objective speech quality model

Hines

Skoglund

Kokaram

et al. 2015

J AUDIO SPEECH MUSIC PROC.

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This paper presents an objective speech quality model, ViSQOL, the Virtual Speech Quality Objective Listener. It is a signal-based, full-reference, intrusive metric that models human speech quality perception using a spectro-temporal measure of similarity between a reference and a test speech signal. The metric has been particularly designed to be robust for quality issues associated with Voice over IP (VoIP) transmission. This paper describes the algorithm and compares the quality predictions with the ITU-T standard metrics PESQ and POLQA for common problems in VoIP: clock drift, associated time warping, and playout delays. The results indicate that ViSQOL and POLQA significantly outperform PESQ, with ViSQOL competing well with POLQA. An extensive benchmarking against PESQ, POLQA, and simpler distance metrics using three speech corpora (NOIZEUS and E4 and the ITU-T P.Sup. 23 database) is also presented. These experiments benchmark the performance for a wide range of quality impairments, including VoIP degradations, a variety of background noise types, speech enhancement methods, and SNR levels. The results and subsequent analysis show that both ViSQOL and POLQA have some performance weaknesses and under-predict perceived quality in certain VoIP conditions. Both have a wider application and robustness to conditions than PESQ or more trivial distance metrics. ViSQOL is shown to offer a useful alternative to POLQA in predicting speech quality in VoIP scenarios.

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Section: Experiments 2: Playout Delay Changesmentioning

confidence: 82%

Section: Performance Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Experiments 2: Playout Delay Changesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Experiments 2: Playout Delay Changesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Experiments 2: Playout Delay Changesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

ViSQOL: an objective speech quality model

Hines

Skoglund

Kokaram

et al. 2015

J AUDIO SPEECH MUSIC PROC.

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Speech quality assessment with WARP‐Q: From similarity to subsequence dynamic time warp cost

Jassim

Skoglund

Chinen

et al. 2022

IET Signal Processing

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Speech coding has been shown to achieve good speech quality using either waveform matching or parametric reconstruction. For very low bit rate streams, recently developed generative speech models can reconstruct high-quality wideband speech from the bit streams of standard parametric encoders at less than 3 kb/s. Generative codecs produce high-quality speech based on synthesising speech from a DNN and the parametric input. Existing objective speech quality models (e.g., ViSQOL and POLQA) cannot be used to accurately evaluate the quality of coded speech from generative models as they penalise based on signal differences not apparent in subjective listening test results. This paper presents WARP-Q, a full-reference objective speech quality metric that uses a dynamic time warping cost for MFCC representations of the signals. It is robust to low perceptual signal changes introduced by low bit rate neural vocoders. An evaluation using waveform matching, parametric, and generative neural vocoder-based codecs as well as channel and environmental noise shows that WARP-Q has better correlation and codec quality ranking for novel codecs compared to traditional metrics as well as the versatility of capturing other types of degradations, such as additive noise and transmission channel degradations.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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