A physical method for measuring speech-transmission quality

Abstract

A physical method for measuring the quality of speech-transmission channels has been developed. Essentially, the method represents an extension of the Articulation Index (AI) concept, which was developed mainly to account for distortions in the frequency domain (noise, bandpass-limiting). The underlying concept of the present approach, based on the Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) of a transmission channel, has been adapted to account for nonlinear distortions (peak clipping) as well as for distortions in the time domain (reverberation, echoes, AGC). The resulting index, the Speech-Transmission Index (STI), has been correlated with subjective intelligibility scores obtained on 167 different transmission channels with a wide variety of disturbances. The relative predictive power of the STI, expressed in PB-word score, appeared to be 5%. This accuracy is comparable with results obtained from subjective measurements when about four talkers and four listeners are used. Expressed in terms of signal-to-noise ratio, the accuracy is about 1 dB. Pilot studies have been carried out to evaluate the use of the STI for testing digital-speech transmission channels.