670 research outputs found
Objective and Subjective Evaluation of Wideband Speech Quality
Traditional landline and cellular communications use a bandwidth of 300 - 3400 Hz for transmitting speech. This narrow bandwidth impacts quality, intelligibility and naturalness of transmitted speech. There is an impending change within the telecommunication industry towards using wider bandwidth speech, but the enlarged bandwidth also introduces a few challenges in speech processing. Echo and noise are two challenging issues in wideband telephony, due to increased perceptual sensitivity by users.
Subjective and/or objective measurements of speech quality are important in benchmarking speech processing algorithms and evaluating the effect of parameters like noise, echo, and delay in wideband telephony. Subjective measures include ratings of speech quality by listeners, whereas objective measures compute a metric based on the reference and degraded speech samples. While subjective quality ratings are the gold - standard\u27\u27, they are also time- and resource- consuming. An objective metric that correlates highly with subjective data is attractive, as it can act as a substitute for subjective quality scores in gauging the performance of different algorithms and devices.
This thesis reports results from a series of experiments on subjective and objective speech quality evaluation for wideband telephony applications. First, a custom wideband noise reduction database was created that contained speech samples corrupted by different background noises at different signal to noise ratios (SNRs) and processed by six different noise reduction algorithms. Comprehensive subjective evaluation of this database revealed an interaction between the algorithm performance, noise type and SNR. Several auditory-based objective metrics such as the Loudness Pattern Distortion (LPD) measure based on the Moore - Glasberg auditory model were evaluated in predicting the subjective scores. In addition, the performance of Bayesian Multivariate Regression Splines(BMLS) was also evaluated in terms of mapping the scores calculated by the objective metrics to the true quality scores. The combination of LPD and BMLS resulted in high correlation with the subjective scores and was used as a substitution for fine - tuning the noise reduction algorithms.
Second, the effect of echo and delay on the wideband speech was evaluated in both listening and conversational context, through both subjective and objective measures. A database containing speech samples corrupted by echo with different delay and frequency response characteristics was created, and was later used to collect subjective quality ratings. The LPD - BMLS objective metric was then validated using the subjective scores.
Third, to evaluate the effect of echo and delay in conversational context, a realtime simulator was developed. Pairs of subjects conversed over the simulated system and rated the quality of their conversations which were degraded by different amount of echo and delay. The quality scores were analysed and LPD+BMLS combination was found to be effective in predicting subjective impressions of quality for condition-averaged data
Adaptive Bayesian Beamforming for Imaging by Marginalizing the Speed of Sound
Imaging methods based on array signal processing often require a fixed
propagation speed of the medium, or speed of sound (SoS) for methods based on
acoustic signals. The resolution of the images formed using these methods is
strongly affected by the assumed SoS, which, due to multipath, nonlinear
propagation, and non-uniform mediums, is challenging at best to select. In this
letter, we propose a Bayesian approach to marginalize the influence of the SoS
on beamformers for imaging. We adapt Bayesian direction-of-arrival estimation
to an imaging setting and integrate a popular minimum variance beamformer over
the posterior of the SoS. To solve the Bayesian integral efficiently, we use
numerical Gauss quadrature. We apply our beamforming approach to shallow water
sonar imaging where multipath and nonlinear propagation is abundant. We compare
against the minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer and
demonstrate that its Bayesian counterpart achieves improved range and azimuthal
resolution while effectively suppressing multipath artifacts
Study of L0-norm constraint normalized subband adaptive filtering algorithm
Limited by fixed step-size and sparsity penalty factor, the conventional
sparsity-aware normalized subband adaptive filtering (NSAF) type algorithms
suffer from trade-off requirements of high filtering accurateness and quicker
convergence behavior. To deal with this problem, this paper proposes variable
step-size L0-norm constraint NSAF algorithms (VSS-L0-NSAFs) for sparse system
identification. We first analyze mean-square-deviation (MSD) statistics
behavior of the L0-NSAF algorithm innovatively in according to a novel
recursion form and arrive at corresponding expressions for the cases that
background noise variance is available and unavailable, where correlation
degree of system input is indicated by scaling parameter r. Based on
derivations, we develop an effective variable step-size scheme through
minimizing the upper bounds of the MSD under some reasonable assumptions and
lemma. To realize performance improvement, an effective reset strategy is
incorporated into presented algorithms to tackle with non-stationary
situations. Finally, numerical simulations corroborate that the proposed
algorithms achieve better performance in terms of estimation accurateness and
tracking capability in comparison with existing related algorithms in sparse
system identification and adaptive echo cancellation circumstances.Comment: 15 pages,15 figure
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