First ISCA ITRW on Auditory Quality of Systems April 23-25, 2003 Akademie Mont-Cenis, Germany

Parameter-Based Speech Quality Measures for GSM

Marc Werner (1), Karsten Kamps (1), Ulrich Tuisel (2), John G. Beerends (3), Peter Vary (1)

(1) Institute of Communication Systems and Data Processing, RWTH Aachen, Germany
(2) E-Plus Mobilfunk GmbH, Düsseldorf, Germany
(3) TNO Telecom, The Netherlands

This contribution introduces non-intrusive instrumental speech quality measures for the GSM system based only on transmission parameters. The idea behind these measures is that parameters which quantify the transmission quality in terms of bit error rate, received power level, etc., may also be suitable to predict the resulting speech quality. Neither the original nor the received speech signal is needed for this kind of prediction. The proposed speech quality measures have been validated by extensive link-level simulations which are based on measurements of transmission parameters collected in a GSM-1800 network. Speech samples were produced by bit-exact transmission simulations using the measured link parameters for channel modelling. The reference speech quality assessments of these samples were carried out with the PESQ algorithm [4]. The correlation of the presented parameter measures with the intrusive PESQ measure is remarkable.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Werner, Marc / Kamps, Karsten / Tuisel, Ulrich / Beerends, John G. / Vary, Peter (2003): "Parameter-based speech quality measures for GSM", In AQS-2003, 29-34.