Assessment of speech quality of law-enforcement audio recordings is important as degradations introduced by non-ideal recording conditions can reduce the intelligence value of such recordings. Furthermore a model that predicts speech quality could be beneficial for assessing the performance of audio collection and enhancement systems. The Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) algorithm (ITU-T P.862) has been validated for degradations common in telecommunications. In this paper we apply PESQ to degradations typically encountered in law-enforcement. Also we present a subjectively labeled database (C-Qual) containing distortions encountered in law enforcement scenarios. Comparing the prediction by PESQ and the observed opinions provided by the listeners shows that PESQ is less suitable for estimating the speech quality in this context.

Authors: Sharma, Dushyant; Hilkhuysen, Gaston; Gaubitch, Nikolay D.; Brookes, Mike; Naylor, Patrick
Affiliations: Imperial College London, UK; University College London, UK(See document for exact affiliation information.)
AES Conference: 39th International Conference: Audio Forensics: Practices and Challenges (June 2010)
Paper Number: 8-1
Publication Date: June 17, 2010
Subject: Speech and Forensics - Automated Systems

Click to purchase paper as a non-member or you can login as an AES member to see more options.

No AES members have commented on this paper yet.

Subscribe to this discussion

To be notified of new comments on this paper you can subscribe to this RSS feed. Forum users should login to see additional options.

Start a discussion!

If you would like to start a discussion about this paper and are an AES member then you can login here:
Username:
Password:

If you are not yet an AES member and have something important to say about this paper then we urge you to join the AES today and make your voice heard. You can join online today by clicking here.