The adequate evaluation of sound quality is an important issue for the lossy compression codecs, such as MP3. ITU-R Rec BS. 1387-1 (PEAQ – Perceptual Evaluation of Audio Quality) is the most widely used method to evaluate sound quality objectively. However, PEAQ can only be used for mono signals or two channel stereo signals, because it considers only timbral factors when assessing sound quality. This paper introduces an improved objective quality assessment method that can be used for mono signals and multichannel audio signals that considers both “spatial” and “timbral” factors. The “spatial” factors, which measure perceptual distortions in spatial impression, are important to evaluate the quality of multichannel sounds.

VoIP is one of the key technologies for recent telecommunication services. In addition to the migration from the conventional PSTN to IP networks, mobile networks will follow the PSTN in moving to an IP-based infrastructure. Due to limited radio resources, the speech bitrate in mobile networks must be more strongly compressed than is true in PSTN. This will lead to a heterogeneous network environment, in which different speech codecs are employed in fixed and mobile networks. Therefore, from the viewpoint of designing and managing the QoE (Quality of Experience) of end-to-end telephony services, establishing a method to evaluate the quality of VoIP in such a heterogeneous network environment is very important. The quality of speech communication services should be discussed in subjective terms. Subjective quality assessment is time-consuming and expensive, however, so objective quality assessment which estimates subjective quality without carrying out subjective quality experiments is desirable. To establish an objective method to evaluate the end-to-end quality of speech in a heterogeneous network environment, this paper proposes a method for estimating the end-to-end listening quality based on the quality in each individual segment. This method is very important because conventional technologies such as the E-model, which was standardized as ITU-T Recommendation G.107, cannot accurately estimate overall quality based on segmental qualities. The experimentals show that the proposed method offers better performance in terms of quality estimation than the conventional method.

Recently, wideband speech communication using 7 kHz-wideband speech coding, as described in ITU-T Recommendations G.722, G.722.1, and G.722.2, has become increasingly necessary for use in advanced IP telephony using PCs, since, for this application, hands-free communication using separate microphones and loudspeakers is indispensable, and in this situation wideband speech is particularly helpful in enhancing the naturalness of communication. An objective quality measurement methodology for wideband-speech coding has been studied, its essential components being an objective quality measure and an input test signal. This paper describes Wideband-PESQ conforming to the draft Annex to ITU-T Recommendation P.862, "Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ)," as the objective quality measure, by evaluating the consistency between the subjectively evaluated MOS (Mean Opinion Score) and objectively estimated MOS. This paper also describes the verification of artificial voice conforming to Recommendation P.50 "Artificial Voices," as the input test signal for such measurements, by evaluating the consistency between the objectively estimated MOS using a real voice and that obtained using an artificial voice.

VoIP is one of the key technologies for recent telecommunication services. The quality of its services should be discussed in subjective terms. Since subjective quality assessment is time-consuming and expensive, however, objective quality assessment which estimates subjective quality without carrying out subjective quality experiments is desirable. This paper discusses the performance of the objective quality measure that was standardized as ITU-T Recommendation P.862 and clarifies the quality factors that can be evaluated with satisfactory accuracy based on it. We found that P.862 can be applied to the evaluation of coding distortion, tandeming of codecs, transmission bit-errors, packet loss, and silence compression in a codec, at least for clean Japanese speech. In addition, we propose a method of estimating the subjective quality evaluation value from objective measurement results and show the validity of this method. We also evaluate the uniqueness of objective quality assessment based on P.862 from the viewpoints of the effect of measurement noise and the variation of test speech samples, and propose how to improve the reproducibility of objective quality assessment.