Article,
PEMO-Q—A New Method for Objective Audio Quality Assessment Using a Model of Auditory Perception
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUDIO, SPEECH, AND LANGUAGE PROCESSING, (2006)
Abstract
A new method for the objective assessment and prediction of perceived
audio quality is introduced. It represents an expansion of the speech
quality measure qC, introduced by Hansen and Kollmeier, and is based
on a psychoacoustically validated, quantitative model of the "effective"
peripheral auditory processing by Dau et al. To evaluate the audio
quality of a given distorted signal relative to a corresponding high-quality
reference signal, the auditory model is employed to compute "internal
representations" of the signals, which are partly assimilated in
order to account for assumed cognitive aspects. The linear cross
correlation coefficient of the assimilated internal representations
represents the perceptual similarity measure (PSM). PSM shows good
correlations with subjective quality ratings if different types of
audio signals are considered separately, whereas a better accuracy
of signal-independent quality prediction is achieved by a second
quality measure PSMt represented by the fifth percentile of the sequence
of instantaneous audio quality PSM(t). The new measures were evaluated
using a large database of subjective listening tests that were originally
carried out on behalf of the International Telecommunication Union
(ITU) and Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) for the evaluation
of various low bit-rate audio codecs. Additional tests with data
unknown in the development phase of the model were carried out. Except
for linear distortions, the new method shows a higher prediction
accuracy than the ITU-R recommendation BS.1387 ("PEAQ") for the tested
data
