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C-Qual—A Validation of PESQ Using Degradations Encountered in Forensic and Law Enforcement Audio

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 Import into BibTeX
Subject:Speech and Forensics - Automated Systems

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