Objective measures for predicting the intelligibility of spectrally smoothed speech with artificial excitation

A study is presented on how well objective measures of speech quality and intelligibility can predict the subjective in- telligibility of speech that has undergone spectral envelope smoothing and simplification of its excitation. Speech modi- fications are made by resynthesising speech that has been spec- trally smoothed. Objective measures are applied to the mod- ified speech and include measures of speech quality, signal- to-noise ratio and intelligibility, as well as proposing the nor- malised frequency-weighted spectral distortion (NFD) measure. The measures are compared to subjective intelligibility scores where it is found that several have high correlation (|r| ≥ 0.7), with NFD achieving the highest correlation (r = −0.81

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Relating Objective and Subjective Performance Measures for AAM-based Visual Speech Synthesizers

We compare two approaches for synthesizing visual speech using Active Appearance Models (AAMs): one that utilizes acoustic features as input, and one that utilizes a phonetic transcription as input. Both synthesizers are trained using the same data and the performance is measured using both objective and subjective testing. We investigate the impact of likely sources of error in the synthesized visual speech by introducing typical errors into real visual speech sequences and subjectively measuring the perceived degradation. When only a small region (e.g. a single syllable) of ground-truth visual speech is incorrect we find that the subjective score for the entire sequence is subjectively lower than sequences generated by our synthesizers. This observation motivates further consideration of an often ignored issue, which is to what extent are subjective measures correlated with objective measures of performance? Significantly, we find that the most commonly used objective measures of performance are not necessarily the best indicator of viewer perception of quality. We empirically evaluate alternatives and show that the cost of a dynamic time warp of synthesized visual speech parameters to the respective ground-truth parameters is a better indicator of subjective quality

Systematic evaluation of perceived spatial quality

The evaluation of perceived spatial quality calls for a method that is sensitive to changes in the constituent dimensions of that quality. In order to devise a method accounting for these changes, several processes have to be performed. This paper shows the development of scales by elicitation and structuring of verbal data, followed by validation of the resulting attribute scales

Predicting Audio Advertisement Quality

Online audio advertising is a particular form of advertising used abundantly in online music streaming services. In these platforms, which tend to host tens of thousands of unique audio advertisements (ads), providing high quality ads ensures a better user experience and results in longer user engagement. Therefore, the automatic assessment of these ads is an important step toward audio ads ranking and better audio ads creation. In this paper we propose one way to measure the quality of the audio ads using a proxy metric called Long Click Rate (LCR), which is defined by the amount of time a user engages with the follow-up display ad (that is shown while the audio ad is playing) divided by the impressions. We later focus on predicting the audio ad quality using only acoustic features such as harmony, rhythm, and timbre of the audio, extracted from the raw waveform. We discuss how the characteristics of the sound can be connected to concepts such as the clarity of the audio ad message, its trustworthiness, etc. Finally, we propose a new deep learning model for audio ad quality prediction, which outperforms the other discussed models trained on hand-crafted features. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-scale audio ad quality prediction study.Comment: WSDM '18 Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, 9 page