Non-intrusive speech quality objective evaluation in high-noise environments

Objective evaluation of speech quality is an important part of the quality of communications service, and the speech in high-noise environments affect the people's auditory perception, which is an important factor for people to determine the speech quality. In this paper, a non-intrusive evaluation method for speech quality in high-noise environments is proposed, and a noise tracking and subtraction algorithm is employed to obtain the quasi clean speech from the high noisy speech. The quasi clean speech is regarded as the reference speech, and a perceptual model, which is a modified version of ITU-T PESQ, is applied to acquire the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) via the measurement of the distortions between the quasi clean speech and the high noisy speech. In the proposed model, only the noisy speech is needed for speech quality evaluation, and the quasi clean speech construction transforms non-intrusive estimation to PESQ intrusive measure. Experimental results demonstrate that the correlation coefficient of the proposed method is 0.906 on NOIZEUS dataset, and is 4.3% superior to ITU-T standard recommendation P.563, which is the state of the art non-intrusive method.