Objective speech quality measurement for Chinese speech.

In the search for the optimisation of transmission speed and storage, speech information is often coded, or transmitted with a reduced bandwidth. As a result, quality and/or intelligibility are sometimes degraded. Speech quality is normally defined as the degree of goodness in the perception of speech while speech intelligibility is how well or clearly one can understand what is being said. In order to assess the level of acceptability of degraded speeches, various subjective methods have been developed to test codecs or sound processing systems. Although good results have been demonstrated with these, they are time consuming and expensive due to the necessary involvement of teams of professional or naive subjects1[56]. To reduce cost, computerised objective systems were created with the hope of replacing human subjects [90][43]. While reasonable standards have been reported by several of these systems, they have not reached the accuracy of well constructed subjective tests yet [92][84]. Therefore, their evaluations and improvements are constantly been researched for further breakthroughs. To date, objective speech quality measurement systems (OSQMs) have been developed mostly in Europe or the United States, and effectiveness is only tested for English, several European and Asian languages but not Chinese (Mandarin) [38][70][32]